Edward Said: Quotes about history

Edward Said was Professor of English and literature. Explore interesting quotes on history.

Edward Said: 48 quotes4 likes

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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