Edward SaidThinkers

Beginning is not only a kind of action. It is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness.

Contrapunctal reading is reading that inquires into the relationship between narratives set in metropolitan centres, or at least in the countryside, of the dominant colonial nations such as england and france, and the colonies upon which the great powers depended for their wealth.

Criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse... its social goals are non-coercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom.

Empire is necessarily always claiming that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.

Empire always 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.

Exile is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: Its essential sadness can never be surmounted. It is a crippling sorrow of estrangement.

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.

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

Humanism is the only resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.

Imperialism , under the United States, gives people their history for them, writes it for them, and re-orders the past, defacing, mutilating, and eradicating history in order to create an order that is favorable to it.

The Intellectual's 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'etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.