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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
Difficult
Intellectuals
Often
Opposition
Price
Keep
Paid
Trying
Courage
Going
Situation
High
Voice

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Egypt has suffered more ordeals than the other countries to get where it is.
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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 a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.
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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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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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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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This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue.
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Religion has to stay in the heart, not in politics. It is private.
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New ideas should confront old ideas. We must refer to the example of Europe. People have fought to make Europe what it is today. Freedom is not something that is served up on a plate.
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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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I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.
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I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.
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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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In Morocco, it's possible to see the Atlantic and the Mediterranean at the same time.
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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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My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.
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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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There is an important erotic element in A Thousand and One Nights, which is one of the keys to understanding the Orient.
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