Edward Said

“The intellectual's role is to speak truth to power.”

“Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.”

“The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.”

“Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home.”

“Beginning is not only a kind of action. It is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness.”

“We cannot fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.”

“Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final - resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”

“Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.”

“Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography.”

“A single overmastering identity is a prison, a trivialization of the irreducible complexity of being human.”

“No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points.”

“My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it is imagined and written.”

“Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient.”

“Criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and not life-denying.”

“The history of other cultures is not a blank slate on which we can inscribe our own meanings.”