Quote

I emphasize in it [my Orientalism] accortdingly that neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other.

Edward Said

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Edward Said
Age: 68 †
Born: 1935
Born: November 1
Died: 2003
Died: November 25
Journalist
Literary Critic
Musicologist
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Professor
Writer
Jerusalem
Middle East
Edward Wadie Said
Made
Concept
Orientalism
Concepts
Ontological
Neither
Orient
West
Emphasize
Effort
Identification
Term
Affirmation
Human
Partly
Humans
Stability

More quotes by Edward Said

Image
It was thought that to rally Islam against godless communism would be doing the Soviet Union a very bad turn indeed, and that, in fact, transpired. In 1985, a group of mujahedeen came to Washington and was greeted by President [Ronald] Reagan, who called them freedom fighters.
Edward Said
Image
We can not fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.
Edward Said
Image
These actions were taken with the support and financing of the United States. How can you say this is part of U.S. adherence to international law and U.N. resolutions? The result is a kind of schizophrenic picture of the United States.
Edward Said
Image
Refuse to allow yourself to become a vegetable that simply absorbs information, pre-packaged, pre-ideologized , because no message.. is anything but an ideological package that has gone through a kind of processing.
Edward Said
Image
Speaking as a New Yorker, I found it (9/11 event] a shocking and terrifying event, particularly the scale of it. At bottom, it was an implacable desire to do harm to innocent people.
Edward Said
Image
In the Islamic world, the U.S. is seen in two quite different ways. One view recognizes what an extraordinary country the U.S. is.
Edward Said
Image
Part of the main plan of imperialism... is that we will give you your history, we will write it for you, we will re-order the past...What's more truly frightening is the defacement, the mutilation, and ultimately the eradication of history in order to create... an order that is favorable to the United States.
Edward Said
Image
Look at situations as contingent, not as inevitable, look at them as the result of a series of historical choices made by men and women, as facts of society made by human beings, and not as natural or god-given, therefore unchangeable, permanent, irreversible.
Edward Said
Image
The history of other cultures is non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.
Edward Said
Image
[Roots of terrorism] come out of a long dialectic of U.S. involvement in the affairs of the Islamic world, the oil-producing world, the Arab world, the Middle East - those areas that are considered to be essential to U.S. interests and security.
Edward Said
Image
Much as I have no wish to hurt anyone's feelings, my first obligation has not been to be nice but to be true to my perhaps peculiar memories, experiences and feelings.
Edward Said
Image
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.
Edward Said
Image
There is also this great sense of triumphalism, that just as we defeated the Soviet Union, we can do this. And out of this sense of desperation and pathological religion, there develops an all-encompassing drive to harm and hurt, without regard for the innocent and the uninvolved, which was the case in New York.
Edward Said
Image
...it is sensible to begin by asking the beginning questions, why imagine power in the first place, and what is the relationship between one's motive for imagining power and the image one ends up with.
Edward Said
Image
It was thought that to rally Islam against godless communism would be doing the Soviet Union a very bad turn indeed, and that, in fact, transpired.
Edward Said
Image
This [9/11 event] was bloody-minded destruction for no other reason than to do it. Note that there was no claim for these attacks. There were no demands. There were no statements. It was a silent piece of terror. This was part of nothing.
Edward Said
Image
What we must eliminate are systems of representation that carry with them the authority which has become repressive because it doesn't permit or make room for interventions on the part of those represented.
Edward Said
Image
I am for peace. And I am for a negotiated peace. But this accord is not a just peace.
Edward Said
Image
Speaking as a New Yorker, I found it a shocking and terrifying event [9/11], particularly the scale of it. At bottom, it was an implacable desire to do harm to innocent people. It was aimed at symbols: the World Trade Center, the heart of American capitalism, and the Pentagon, the headquarters of the American military establishment.
Edward Said
Image
Density, complexity, and historical-semantic value that is so strong as to make politics possible... Gramsci's insight is to have recognised that subordination, fracturing, diffusion, reproducing, as much as producing, creating, forcing, guiding, are necessary aspects of elaboration.
Edward Said