Edward Said Quotes

Imperialism is still alive and well. You don’t have a military force of the size that the US this very moment has in the middle of the Arab world & call it ‘self-inflicted violence,’ it is imported from the outside.

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

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

Since when does a militarily occupied people have the responsibility for a peace movement?

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

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

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

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

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.

The United States that has been involved first in the Gulf War and then in the tremendously damaging sanctions against Iraqi civilians. The United States that is the supporter of Israel against the Palestinians.

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.

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.