Quote

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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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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Religion has to stay in the heart, not in politics. It is private.
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At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets.
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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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This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue.
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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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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 am a Moroccan writer of French expression.
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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 liked Sartre's views but not his writing.
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We do not have many intellectuals who can speak out for us internationally. We have no writers who are recognized, respected and loved outside the Arab world.
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Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.
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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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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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Egypt has suffered more ordeals than the other countries to get where it is.
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My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.
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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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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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In Morocco, it's possible to see the Atlantic and the Mediterranean at the same time.
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Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.
Tahar Ben Jelloun