Quotes by Edward Said
“No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points.”— Edward Said
“Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home.”— Edward Said
“The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.”— Edward Said
“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.”— Edward Said
“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.”— Edward Said
“We cannot fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.”— Edward Said
“Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography.”— Edward Said
“My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it is imagined and written.”— Edward Said
“Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.”— Edward Said
“The history of other cultures is not a blank slate on which we can inscribe our own meanings.”— Edward Said
“Beginning is not only a kind of action. It is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness.”— Edward Said
“A single overmastering identity is a prison, a trivialization of the irreducible complexity of being human.”— Edward Said