86 Quotes by Edward Said

O conhecimento confere poder, mais poder requer mais conhecimento, e assim por diante em uma dialética crescentemente lucrativa de informação e controle.

Witnessing a sorry state of affairs when one is not in power is by no means a monotone, monochromatic activity. It involves what Foucault once called a "relentless erudition," scouring alternative sources, exhuming buried documents, reviving forgotten (or abandoned) histories.

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 interest of human freedom

All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.

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.

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

Knowledge means rising above immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant. The object of such knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny; the object is a ‘fact’ which, if it develops, changes, or otherwise transforms itself in the way that civilizations frequently do, nevertheless is fundamentally, even ontologically stable. To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it.

Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.

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