56 Quotes by Edward W. Said

Theory is taught so as to make the student believe that he or she can become a Marxist, a feminist, an Afrocentrist, or a deconstructionist with about the same effort and commitment required in choosing items from a menu.

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

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.

The just response to this terrible event should be to go immediately to the world community, the United Nations. The rule of international law should be marshaled, but it’s probably too late because the United States has never done that; it’s always gone it alone.

It’s very hard, for example, to justify the thirty-four-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It’s very hard to justify 140 Israeli settlements and roughly 400,000 settlers.

Until the June 1967 war I was completely caught up in the life of a young professor of English. Beginning in 1968, I started to think, write, and travel as someone who felt himself to be directly involved in the renaissance of Palestinian life and politics.

Ironically, many of these people, including Osama bin Laden and the mujahedeen, were, in fact, nourished by the United States in the early eighties in its efforts to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

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.

To say that we’re going to end countries or eradicate terrorism, and that it’s a long war over many years, with many different instruments, suggests a much more complex and drawn-out conflict for which, I think, most Americans aren’t prepared.