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Intellectuals try to keep going. But their situation is very difficult. Those who have had the courage to voice their opposition have often paid a very high price.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

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Tahar Ben Jelloun
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: December 1
Novelist
Poet
Psychotherapist
Writer
Fes
Morocco
Often
Opposition
Keep
Price
Trying
Paid
Going
Courage
Situation
High
Voice
Difficult
Intellectuals

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Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.
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What have we achieved since the end of the Second World War? We have allowed petty, bourgeois regimes in which everything is average, mediocre.
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Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.
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Most of those who died did not die of hunger but of hatred. Feeling hatred diminishes you. It eats at your from within and attacks the immune system. When you have hatred inside you, it always crushes you in the end.
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Religion has to stay in the heart, not in politics. It is private.
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I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.
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I don't feel guilty about expressing myself in French nor do I feel that I am continuing the work of the colonizers.
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At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets.
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A modern civilization is only possible when it is accepted that singular beings exist and express themselves freely.
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I do not use the language of my people. I can take liberties with certain themes which the Arabic language would not allow me to take.
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I am a Moroccan writer of French expression.
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It is impossible to disregard such an important medium as television. We should know how to use it, learn to work in it and express new values in it.
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This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue.
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Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.
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My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.
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In Morocco, it's possible to see the Atlantic and the Mediterranean at the same time.
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In the Arab world, there is no link between the cultural habits of peoples and the ways of thinking and creating of modern intellectuals. They are two separate worlds.
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Emigration is no longer a solution it's a defeat. People are risking death, drowning every day, but they're knocking on doors that are not open.
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Our steps invent the path as we proceed behind us they leave no trace, only the void. So we shall always look ahead and trust our feet. They will take us as far as our minds will go... -- Tahar ben Jelloun
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We have no Arab intellectuals of international stature because we live in a state of generalized mediocrity. We are suspended in the pit without touching the bottom.
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