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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

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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
Events
Scale
Desire
Scales
Found
Event
People
Speaking
Innocent
Implacable
Particularly
Yorker
Harm
Terrifying
Bottom
Shocking

More quotes by Edward Said

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We are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies. (p. 5)
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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.
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Most Arabs and Muslims feel that the United States hasn't really been paying much attention to their desires. They think it has been pursuing its policies for its own sake and not according to many of the principles that it claims are its own - democracy, self-determination, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, international law.
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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
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It [destroying Twin Towers] was a leap into another realm - the realm of crazy abstractions and mythological generalities, involving people who have hijacked Islam for their own purposes. It's important not to fall into that trap and to try to respond with a metaphysical retaliation of some sort.
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I am for peace. And I am for a negotiated peace. But this accord is not a just peace.
Edward Said
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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.
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The United States that has been involved first in the Gulf War and then in the tremendously damaging sanctions against Iraqi civilians. The United States that is the supporter of Israel against the Palestinians.
Edward Said
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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
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[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
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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
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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
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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
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...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
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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
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The history of other cultures is non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.
Edward Said
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Ironically, many of these people, including Osama bin Laden and the mujahedeen, were, in fact, nourished by the United States in the early eighties in its efforts to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
Edward Said
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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
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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
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To say that we're going to end countries or eradicate terrorism, and that it's a long war over many years, with many different instruments, suggests a much more complex and drawn-out conflict for which, I think, most Americans aren't prepared.
Edward Said