Top 50 Edward W. Said Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “History is written by those who win and those who dominate.”

— Edward W. Said

2. “We can not fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.”

— Edward W. Said

3. “Humanism is the only – I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”

— Edward W. Said

4. “Every empire, however, 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.”

— Edward W. Said

5. “Since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”

— Edward W. Said

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

— Edward W. Said

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

— Edward W. Said

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

— Edward W. Said

9. “What we must eliminate are systems of representation that carry with them the authority which has become repressive because it doesn’t permit or make room for interventions on the part of those represented.”

— Edward W. Said

10. “Look at situations as contingent, not as inevitable, look at them as the result of a series of historical choices made by men and women, as facts of society made by human beings, and not as natural or god-given, therefore unchangeable, permanent, irreversible.”

— Edward W. Said

11. “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.”

— Edward W. Said

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

— Edward W. Said

13. “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 W. Said

14. “I am for peace. And I am for a negotiated peace. But this accord is not a just peace.”

— Edward W. Said

15. “Since when does a militarily occupied people have the responsibility for a peace movement?”

— Edward W. Said

16. “The definition of terrorism has to be more precise, so that we are able to discriminate between, for example, what it is that the Palestinians are doing to fight the Israeli military occupation and terrorism of the sort that resulted in the World Trade Center bombing.”

— Edward W. Said

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

— Edward W. Said

18. “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 W. Said

19. “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.”

— Edward W. Said

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

— Edward W. Said

21. “Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.”

— Edward W. Said

22. “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.”

— Edward W. Said

23. “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 W. Said

24. “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 W. Said

25. “To say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule is to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact.”

— Edward W. Said

26. “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.”

— Edward W. Said

27. “The other view is of the official United States, the United States of armies and interventions. The United States that in 1953 overthrew the nationalist government of Mossadegh in Iran and brought back the shah.”

— Edward W. Said

28. “Uninformed and yet open to appeals for justice as they are, Americans are capable of reacting as they did to the ANC campaign against apartheid, which finally changed the balance of forces inside South Africa.”

— Edward W. Said

29. “We allow justly that the Holocaust has permanently altered the consciousness of our time: Why do we not accord the same epistemological mutation in what imperialism has done, and what Orientalism continues to do?”

— Edward W. Said

30. “Our role is to widen the field of discussion, not to set limits in accord with the prevailing authority.”

— Edward W. Said

31. “The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be – that is, submitted to being – made Oriental.”

— Edward W. Said

32. “My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated, so that “our” East, “our” Orient becomes “ours” to possess and direct. I should say again that I have.”

— Edward W. Said

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

— Edward W. Said

34. “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.”

— Edward W. Said

35. “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.”

— Edward W. Said

36. “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.”

— Edward W. Said

37. “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.”

— Edward W. Said

38. “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 W. Said

39. “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.”

— Edward W. Said

40. “In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci says: “The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.” The only available English translation inexplicably leaves Gramsci’s comment at that, whereas in fact Gramsci’s Italian text concludes by adding, “therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.”

— Edward W. Said

41. “In 1985, a group of mujahedeen came to Washington and was greeted by President Reagan, who called them “freedom fighters.” These people, by the way, don’t represent Islam in any formal sense. They’re not imams or sheiks. They are self-appointed warriors for Islam.”

— Edward W. Said

42. “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.”

— Edward W. Said

43. “We live in one global environment with a huge number of ecological, economic, social, and political pressures tearing at its only dimly perceived, basically uninterpreted and uncomprehended fabric. Anyone with even a vague consciousness of this whole is alarmed at how such remorselessly selfish and narrow interests – patriotism, chauvinism, ethnic, religious, and racial hatreds – can in fact lead to mass destructiveness. The world simply cannot afford this many more times.”

— Edward W. Said

44. “It seems a common human failing to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human.”

— Edward W. Said

45. “By humanism I mean first of all attempting to dissolve Blake’s mind-forg’d manacles so as to be able to use one’s mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding and genuine disclosure. Moreover, humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking, therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist.”

— Edward W. Said

46. “Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow.”

— Edward W. Said

47. “Most professional humanists as a result are unable to make the connection between the prolonged and sordid cruelty of practices such as slavery, colonialist and racial oppression, and imperial subjection on the one hand, and the poetry, fiction, philosophy of the society that engages in these practices on the other.”

— Edward W. Said

48. “The more one is able to leave one’s cultural home, the more easily is one able to judge it, and the whole world as well, with the spiritual detachment and generosity necessary for true vision. The more easily, too, does one assess oneself and alien cultures with the same combination of intimacy and distance.”

— Edward W. Said

49. “To treat fiction as if it were a religious or moral sermon is about as far from the actuality of literature as it is possible to get and indeed it is, in my opinion, the purest form of intellectual barbarism.”

— Edward W. Said

50. “Perhaps if we remember that the study of human experience usually has an ethical, to say nothing of a political consequence in either the best or worst sense, we will not be indifferent to what we do as scholars.”

— Edward W. Said