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.