Know your authors: Edward Said – renowned middle east writer quotes

Edward Wadie Said was one of the well-known authors of the middle east who shined their name at the international level. He was a professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies. He was born on 1 November 1935 in Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine.

Some pieces of Edward’s writings are shared below:

• You can’t continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once; there has to be a limit. 
• 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.
• We can not fight for our rights & our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness. 
• 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. 
• It is quite common to hear the high officials in Washington & 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. 
• My argument is that – history is made by men & women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated. 
• 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. 
• 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. 
• We are at – a point in our work when – we can no longer ignore empires & the imperial context in our studies. 
• Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.