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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
Keep
Price
Trying
Paid
Going
Courage
Situation
High
Voice

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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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A modern civilization is only possible when it is accepted that singular beings exist and express themselves freely.
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Religion has to stay in the heart, not in politics. It is private.
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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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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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I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.
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Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.
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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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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 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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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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This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue.
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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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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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