Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Edward Said, fully Edward Wadie Said

American Educator, Professor of Literature at Columbia University, Intellectual, Founder of the academic field of Postcolonial Studies

"Alastcherq in essence a political doctrine to impose an obligation for the Middle East because it was weaker than the West, and he ignored the reflux to the weakness difference in the Middle."

"Alasctrac definition: a kind of Western projection and will rule the West of the East, in the style Altgkir based on excellence should be related to the exchange of knowledge between East and West."

"All the words that George Bush used in public during the early stages of the crisis - "wanted, dead or alive," "a crusade," etc. - suggest not so much an orderly and considered progress towards bringing the man to justice according to international norms, but rather something apocalyptic, something of the order of the criminal atrocity itself. That will make matters a lot, lot worse, because there are always consequences."

"All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation? for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place."

"Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being. No better instance exists today of what Anwar Abdel Malek calls the hegemonism of possessing minorities and anthropocentrism allied with Europocentrism: a white middle-class Westerner believes it his human prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but also to own it, just because by definition it is not quite as human as we are. There is no purer example than this of dehumanized thought."

"An elaborated culture has a 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."

"And what if my mother passed on to English until the tone becomes more objective and serious intimacy is almost completely expelled tolerant and Almtamosagh first language, Arabic ,"

"And in this relentlessly unfolding series of interactions, the U.S. has played a very distinctive role, which most Americans have been either shielded from or simply unaware of."

"And why is it acceptable cooperation with Arab governments that have established Salehha with Israel, while still dealing with any Israeli something great crime? I am addressing these questions Mntlv Mahmama Devil is nothing but ."

"Arabs, for example, are thought of as camel-riding, terroristic, hook-nosed, venal lechers whose undeserved wealth is an affront to real civilization. Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being."

"Beginning is not only a kind of action. It is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness."

"But I do not know whether the photograph can, or does, say things as they really are. Something has been lost. But the representation is all we have."

"And what terrifies me is that we're entering a phase where if you start to speak about this as something that can be understood historically - without any sympathy - you are going to be thought of as unpatriotic, and you are going to be forbidden. It's very dangerous. It is precisely incumbent on every citizen to quite understand the world we're living in and the history we are a part of and we are forming as a superpower."

"But, on the other hand, the study of music is one of the best ways to learn about human nature. This is why I am so sad about music education being practically nonexistent today in schools. Education means preparing children for adult life; teaching them how to behave and what kinds of human beings they want to be. Everything else is information and can be learned in a very simple way. To play music well you need to strike a balance between your head, your heart, and your stomach. And if one of the three is not there or is there in too strong a dose, you cannot use it. What better way than music to show a child how to be human?"

"At peace and in rights I want human sexes penetrate in the depth origin."

"Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present."

"By humanism I mean first of all attempting to dissolve Blake?s mind-forg?d manacles so as to be able to use one?s mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding and genuine disclosure. Moreover, humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking, therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist."

"Captain Ahab was a man possessed with an obsessional drive to pursue the white whale which had harmed him - which had torn his leg out - to the ends of the Earth, no matter what happened. In the final scene of the novel, Captain Ahab is being borne out to sea, wrapped around the white whale with the rope of his own harpoon and going obviously to his death. It was a scene of almost suicidal finality."

"Consider that in 1800 Western powers claimed 55 percent but actually held approximately 35 percent of the earth's surface, and that by 1874 the proportion was 67 percent, a rate of increase of 83,000 square miles per year. By 1914, the annual rate had risen to an astonishing 240,000 square miles [per year], and Europe held a grand total of roughly 85 percent of the earth as colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions, and commonwealths. No other associated set of colonies in history was as large, none so totally dominated, none so unequal in power to the Western metropolis. Culture and Imperialism, pg. 8"

"Culture is not monolithic either and is not the exclusive property of the East or West nor of the small groups of men and women."

"Criticism must think of itself as life -enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; social Goals are On its non-Coercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom."

"Egypt restored to prosperity, regenerated by wise and enlightened administration ? would shed its civilizing rays upon all its Oriental neighbors."

"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."

"Despite their pervasiveness, each of them can be countered by what I shall call amateurism, the desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in mak?ing connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values de?spite the restrictions of a profession."

"Density, complexity, and historical-semantic value that is so strong as to make politics possible... Gramsci's insight is to have recognized that subordination, fracturing, diffusion, reproducing, as much as producing, creating, forcing, guiding, are necessary aspects of elaboration."

"Despite the variety and the differences, and however much we proclaim the contrary, what the media produce is neither spontaneous nor completely free: news does not just happen, pictures and ideas do not merely spring from reality into our eyes and minds, truth is not directly available, we do not have unrestrained variety at our disposal. For like all modes of communication, television, radio, and newspapers observe certain rules and conventions to get things across intelligibly, and it is these, often more than the reality being conveyed, that shape the material delivered by the media."

"Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and its native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted."

"Every writer on the Orient (and this is true even of Homer) assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and on which he relies. Additionally, each work on the Orient affiliates itself with other works, with audiences, with institutions, with the Orient itself. The ensemble of relationships Between works, audiences, and some Particular aspects of the Orient Therefore Constitutes an Analyzable formation [...] Whose Presence in time, in discourse, in institutions (schools, libraries, foreign services) Gives it strength and authority."

"For European 19th century? Orientalism was one such system of truths, truths are defined by Nietzsche that word [cf: truths are illusions which we have forgotten that 'they are ]. It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was for this reason, racist, imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric."

"Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice."

"human societies, at least the more advanced cultures, have rarely offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with other cultures."

"History is written by those who win and those who dominate."

"Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history."

"I absolutely believe - and I tried to show in my other works - enough things are today in the humanities to offer scientists insights, methods and ideas allowing them to spend racial, ideological and imperialist stereotypes of the sort that Orientalism provided during the upward phase of history. I consider the failure of Orientalism was a human failure as well as an intellectual failure; Indeed, having to oppose implacably to a region of the world he regarded as other than his own, Orientalism was not able to identify with human experience, or even the considered as an experiment."

"I am for peace. And I am for a negotiated peace. But this accord is not a just peace."

"I emphasize in it [my Orientalism] accordingly 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."

"I do not see what is more worthy Balasthjan which acquired cultured intellectual habits tend him about the so - called Dodge any recidivism or abandon (practiced by many) for consistency in his position based on the principles, the difficulty of it, which is acutely aware knows that the right attitude but he chooses not to abide by it, he does not want to appear in the image of it took on more than a political Luna should, he tries not to show the image of people different from him, and he needs the consent of his boss about it, or the satisfaction of representing power, and wants to maintain his reputation as a balanced, objective, moderate, he hopes to ask again for counseling, or to participate in the membership of the board or committee reputable, and that remains , then the mainstream are able to take responsibility, and hoping to get days honorary degrees, or grand prize, perhaps the post of ambassador to a foreign country."

"Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied."

"If you look at the curricula of most universities and schools in this country [USA], considering our long encounter with the Islamic world, there is very little there that you can get hold of that is really informative about Islam. If you look at the popular media, you'll see that the stereotype that begins with Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik has really remained and developed into the transnational villain of television and film and culture in general."

"I have been unable to live an uncommitted or suspended life. I have not hesitated to declare my affiliation with an extremely unpopular cause."

"I could see my stay pleasant Jerusalemite. But where it torments me loose and temporary, but fleeting. It later turned out to be really well."

"I don't remember when exactly I read my first comic book, but I do remember exactly how liberated and subversive I felt as a result."

"I have never known what is Arabic or English, or which one was really mine beyond any doubt. What I do know, however, is that the two have always been together in my life, one resonating in the other, sometimes ironically, sometimes nostalgically, most often each correcting, and commenting on, the other. Each can seem like my absolutely first language, but neither is."

"I have begun with the assumption that the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either. We must take seriously Vico?s great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities?to say nothing of historical entities?such locales, regions, geographical sectors as Orient and Occident are man-made. Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other."

"I mean to ask whether there is any way of avoiding the hostility expressed by the division say, of men into us (Westerners) and they (Orientals). For such divisions are generalities whose use historically and actually has been to press the importance of the distinction between some men and some other men, usually towards not especially admirable ends."

"I have spent a great deal of my life during the past thirty-five years advocating the rights of the Palestinian people to national self-determination, but I have always tried to do that with full attention paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they suffered by the way of persecution and genocide. The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, coexistence, and not further suppression and denial. Not accidentally, I indicate that Orientalism and modern anti-Semitism have common roots. Therefore, it would seem to be a vital necessity for independent intellectuals always to provide alternative models to the reductively simplifying and confining ones, based on mutual hostility, that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for so long."

"I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for... Criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom."

"In 1985, a group of mujahedeen came to Washington and was greeted by President Reagan, who called them "freedom fighters." These people, by the way, don't represent Islam in any formal sense. They're not imams or sheiks. They are self-appointed warriors for Islam."

"In a sense the limitations of Orientalism are, as I said earlier, the limitations that follow upon disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people, or geographical region."

"If you want to uphold basic human justice , we must apply it to everyone, I am not limited to those who choose allows you to their party to which they belong, and allow you to their culture or nation."