Quotes from Edward Said

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Exile is predicated on the existence of, love for, and a real bond with one's native place; the universal truth of exile is not that one has lost that love or home, but that inherent in each is an unexpected, unwelcome loss. Regard experiences then as if they were about to disappear.

Orientalism… a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.

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.

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

I was one of the first people in the Palestinian world, in the late 1970s, to say that there is no military option, either for us or for them, and I'm certainly the only well-known Arab who writes these things - and who writes exactly the same things in the Arab press that I say here.

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.

I don't myself believe in a two-state solution. I believe in a one-state solution.

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.

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

The inner me was always under attack by authority, by the way my parents wanted me to be brought up, by these English schools I went to. So I've always felt this kind of anti-authoritarian strain in me, pushing to express itself despite the obstacles.

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