Talk:Edward Said

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• Genet, therefore, is the traveler across identities, the tourist whose purpose is marriage with a foreign cause, so long as that cause is both revolutionary and in constant agitation.

• American politics are deeply contradictory of course, but anti-intellectualism . . . is the common strain. This includes a deep suspicion of anything that isn't simple, fundamental, traditional, down-to-earth and "American" in the ideological sense, and can be exploited easily by demagogues and cynical politicians of the right. The key word is "freedom", which includes the freedom to own and use firearms, the freedom to trade and use the marketplace without restraint even if it means serious injury to health and decency, the freedom above all to make America's will rule all over the earth.

• Remember the solidarity shown to Palestine here and everywhere... and remember also that there is a cause to which many people have committed themselves, difficulties and terrible obstacles notwithstanding. Why? Because it is a just cause, a noble ideal, a moral quest for equality and human rights.

• 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.

• For the intellectual the task, I believe, is explicitly to universalize the crisis, to give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the suffering of others.

• I urge everyone to join in and not leave the field of values, defintions, and cultures uncontested. They are certainly not the property of a few Washington offiicials, any more than they are the responsibility of a few Middle Eastern rulers. There is a common field of human undertaking being created and recreated, and no amount of imperial bluster can ever conceal or negate that fact.

• We can regret what might have been... but we have no reason to be ungrateful for what there is.

• There can be no peace in the Middle East until the injustices committed by the Israeli government against Palestinians cease. Rather than go to war against Iraq, the United States should examine its support of Israel and by extension that country's considerable human rights violations.

Quotes about Edward Said

• That rare figure: a truly public intellectual who has a powerful influence within the academy and also a potent public presence. He's a very brilliant reader, of both texts and political situations.
  • Seamus Deane, Irish critic

• Over the past three decades he was the most eloquent spokesman for the plight of the Palestinians.
  • Hamid Dabashi, chairman of Columbia's Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures Department.

• He was one of those rare people who was permanently aware of the fact that information is only the very first step toward understanding. And he always looked for the "beyond" in the idea, the "unseen" by the eye, the "unheard" by the ear.
  • Daniel Barenboim, Conductor.

• [Said] reads the world as closely as he reads books.
  • Salman Rushdie, author.

Removed quotes

• "...here I have a very strong objection to what Edward Said writes in his book Orientalism. I am sure this book is very popular with you and I think it is very important for me to say that, there were many European intellectuals who wrote without any explicit design of hegemonizing the people they were writing about,their purpose was intellectual not political, what Edward said has done is great disservice to knowledge that he has turned entire landscape into a flat land where every European writing on Islam particularly, or on India is harboring some kind of a nefarious design to control, that I think is most vulnerable part of Edward Said's book Orientalism ..., this is about anybody who is an outsider, therefore I would like to mention this very strongly, this outsider insider debate, people who are not Indians do not should not write on India, people who are not Muslim should not write on Islam because they will never understand Islam,...; I am afraid all these things are totally redundant in our world of professional historical research which has lot of drawbacks and weakness which we try to fine tune, except for this kind of artificial divide between, 'us better equipped Muslims and they ill equipped non Muslims to understand religion and politics',... so there fore ...Some of them writing also to control India so I am not saying that element of control is absent, (it's) very much there..."
  • Prof. Najaf Haider - Dept. of History, JNU Haider, Prof. Najaf (- Dept. of History, JNU) (December 19, 2018). All India History Summit 2018. YouTube.

Quote to verify if it is from Said

• At a Mansion House conference on the subject five years later, Curzon finally dotted the i’s. Oriental studies were no intellectual luxury; they were, he said,
  a great Imperial obligation. In my view the creation of a school [of Oriental studies—later to become the London University School of Oriental and African Studies] like this in London is part of the necessary furniture of Empire. Those of us who, in one way or another, have spent a number of years in the East, who regard that as the happiest portion of our lives, and who think that the work that we did there, be it great or small, was the highest responsibility that can be placed upon the shoulders of Englishmen, feel that there is a gap in our national equipment which ought emphatically to be filled, and that those in the City of London who, by financial support or by any other form of active and practical assistance, take their part in filling that gap, will be rendering a patriotic duty to the Empire and promoting the cause and goodwill among mankind.
  • Edward Said, Orientalism, quoting Curzon

ᘙ (talk) 17:35, 6 December 2022 (UTC)