Edward Said Short Quotes

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No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.

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

Edward Said
Orientalism... a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.

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

Edward Said
We are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies.

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

Edward Said
It was thought that to rally Islam against godless communism would be doing the Soviet Union a very bad turn indeed, and that, in fact, transpired.

Edward Said
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.

Edward Said
There's been essentially the same analysis over and over again and very little allowance made for different views and interpretations and reflections.

Edward Said
There are far too many politicized people on earth today for any nation readily to accept the finality of America's historical mission to lead the world.

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
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
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
It is sensible to begin by asking the beginning questions, why imagine power in the first place, and what is the relationship between one's motive for imagining power and the image one ends up with.

Edward Said