1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Edward Said

Edward Said Quotes

Edward Wadie Said was a professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies. A Palestinian American born in Mandatory Palestine, he was a citizen of the United States by way of his father, a U.S. Army veteran.

Educated in the Western canon, at British and American schools, Said applied his education and bi-cultural perspective to illuminating the gaps of cultural and political understanding between the Western world and the Eastern world, especially about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the Middle East; his principal influences were Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Michel Foucault, and Theodor Adorno.As a cultural critic, Said is known for the book Orientalism , a critique of the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism—how the Western world perceives the Orient. Said's model of textual analysis transformed the academic discourse of researchers in literary theory, literary criticism, and Middle-Eastern studies—how academics examine, describe, and define the cultures being studied. As a foundational text, Orientalism was controversial among scholars of Oriental Studies, philosophy, and literature.As a public intellectual, Said was a controversial member of the Palestinian National Council, due to his public criticism of Israel and the Arab countries, especially the political and cultural policies of Muslim régimes who acted against the national interests of their peoples. Said advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state to ensure equal political and human rights for the Palestinians in Israel, including the right of return to the homeland. He defined his oppositional relation with the status quo as the remit of the public intellectual who has "to sift, to judge, to criticize, to choose, so that choice and agency return to the individual" man and woman.

In 1999, with his friend Daniel Barenboim, Said co-founded the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, based in Seville, which comprises young Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab musicians. Besides being an academic, Said was also an accomplished pianist, and, with Barenboim, co-authored the book Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society , a compilation of their conversations about music.Said died of leukemia on 24 September 2003. Wikipedia  

✵ 1. November 1935 – 25. September 2003
Edward Said photo

Works

Orientalism
Orientalism
Edward Said
Edward Said: 24 quotes4 likes

Famous Edward Said Quotes

“You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit”

Edward Said

“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.”

Edward Said

Source: Palestine

“We are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies. (p. 5)”

Edward Said book Culture and Imperialism

Source: Culture and Imperialism

“Much as I have no wish to hurt anyone's feelings, my first obligation has not been to be nice but to be true to my perhaps peculiar memories, experiences and feelings.”

Edward Said

Source: Out of Place

“It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar.”

Edward Said

“My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.”

Edward Said

Edward Said Quotes about history

“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

“We can not fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.”

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 book Orientalism

Orientalism (1978)

“The history of other cultures is non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.”

Edward Said book Culture and Imperialism

Culture and Imperialism (1993), Chap 4, Sect 2

“A historian of science is not expected to be a scientist, but he is expected to have some basic knowledge of the scientific alphabet. Similarly, a historian of Orientalism—that is to say, the work of historians and philologists—should have at least some acquaintance with the history and philology with which they were concerned.”

Edward Said

Bernard Lewis, "The Question of Orientalism", The New York Review of Books, 24 June 1982

Edward Said Quotes about the world

“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."

(, July 20, 2003)”

Edward Said

“The intellectual origins of literary theory in Europe were, I think it is accurate to say, insurrectionary. The traditional university, the hegemony of determinism and positivism, the reification of ideological bourgeois “humanism,” the rigid barriers between academic specialties: it was powerful responses to all these that linked together such influential progenitors of today’s literary theorist as Saussure, Lukács, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx. Theory proposed itself as a synthesis overriding the petty fiefdoms within the world of intellectual production, and it was manifestly to be hoped as a result that all the domains of human activity could be seen, and lived, as a unity. … Literary theory, whether of the Left or the Right, has turned its back on these things. This can be considered, I think, the triumph of the ethic of professionalism. But it is no accident that the emergence of so narrowly defined a philosophy of pure textuality and critical noninterference has coincided with the ascendancy of Reaganism.”

Edward Said

The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), pp. 3-4

“The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire. … The Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear the figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate. The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe.”

Edward Said book Orientalism

Orientalism (1978)

“The prevailing situation of criticism… has given rise to a cult of professional expertise whose effect in general is pernicious. For the intellectual class, expertise has usually been a service rendered, and sold, to the central authority of society. This is the trahison des clercs of which Julien Benda spoke in the 1920s. Expertise in foreign affairs, for example, has usually meant the legitimization of the conduct of foreign policy and, what is more to the point, a sustained investment in revalidating the role of experts in foreign affairs. The same sort of thing is true of literary critics and professional humanists, except that their expertise is based upon noninterference in what Vico grandly calls the world of nations but which prosaically might just as well be called “the world.” We tell our students and our general constituency that we defend the classics, the virtues of a liberal education, and the precious pleasures of literature even as we also show ourselves to be silent (perhaps incompetent) about the historical and social world in which all these things take place…. Humanists and intellectuals accept the idea that… cultural types are not supposed to interfere in matters for which the social system has not certified them.”

Edward Said

The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), pp. 2-3

Edward Said Quotes

“I emphasize in it [my Orientalism] accortdingly 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.”

Edward Said

“[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.”

Edward Said

Quoted in Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-335-15275-9), p. 248

“It isn’t at all a matter of being optimistic, but rather of continuing to have faith in the ongoing and literally unending process of emancipation and enlightenment that, in my opinion, frames and gives direction to the intellectual vocation.”

Edward Said book Orientalism

Preface to 25th anniversary edition of Orientalism (1994), p. xv
Orientalism (1978)

“The central fact for me is, I think, that the [role of the] intellectual … cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d'être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.”

Edward Said

Representation of the Intellectual http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gmx4c (1994)

“Theory is taught so as to make the student believe that he or she can become a Marxist, a feminist, an Afrocentrist, or a deconstructionist with about the same effort and commitment required in choosing items from a menu.”

Edward Said book Culture and Imperialism

Culture and Imperialism (1993), Chap 4, Sect 2

“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.”

Edward Said book Orientalism

"Preface (2003)"
Orientalism (1978)

“As an Egyptian of Palestinian origin teaching English literature at an American university, who had built his scholarly career on a Polish sailor that became an English writer (Joseph Conrad), Said’s assertion that western orientalists could not comprehend the East and easterners because they were born into a different culture, seems somewhat bizarre.”

Edward Said

Yoav Gelber, Nation and History: Israeli Historiography between Zionism and Post-Zionism (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011), p. 56

“Where cruelty and injustice are concerned, hopelessness is submission, which I believe is immoral.”

Edward Said

quoted in "Internal Exile" by Pankaj Mishra in The New Yorker, 2022

Similar authors

Aldous Huxley photo
Aldous Huxley290
English writer None
John Galsworthy photo
John Galsworthy48
English novelist and playwright None
Eugene O'Neill photo
Eugene O'Neill36
American playwright, and Nobel laureate in Literature None
Jorge Luis Borges photo
Jorge Luis Borges213
Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator… None
Octavio Paz photo
Octavio Paz71
Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Lite… None
Orhan Pamuk photo
Orhan Pamuk55
Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literatu… None
William Golding photo
William Golding79
British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Lite… None
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien photo
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien78
British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy … None
Virginia Woolf photo
Virginia Woolf382
English writer None
Joseph Brodsky photo
Joseph Brodsky17
Russian and American poet and Nobel Prize for Literature la… None