Edward Said

"The critic must be simultaneously inside and outside"

"Humanism requires acknowledging our common vulnerability"

"History is written by those with power to represent it"

"The university is a site where dominant ideas are naturalized"

"We must read the world as a text"

"Politics is never absent from cultural expression"

"The colonized person never simply accepts imposed identity"

"Language does not simply describe reality but constructs it"

"Secular criticism allows genuine plurality of perspectives"

"The intellectual's duty is to be difficult and challenging"

"Art is where the utopian impulse finds expression"

"We are all contaminated by the systems we oppose"

"The question is not whether we are implicated but how we respond"

"Reading requires hospitality toward unfamiliar perspectives"

"Power relations are inscribed in the smallest details of representation"

"The goal of criticism is to elaborate alternatives"

"Identity is relational and contextual, not essential"

"We must learn to think outside the boundaries of disciplines"

"Culture is a site of struggle for meaning and legitimacy"

"The scholar has an obligation to the marginalized"

"Representation always involves power and therefore ethics"

"The intellectual must maintain critical distance"

"Imagination is where liberation begins"

"We must refuse the colonization of thought"

"History is constantly rewritten from the perspective of the present"

"Literature teaches us to see what we have been trained not to see"

"The task of criticism is to make the familiar strange"

"Power operates through our desires and consensual participation"

"We are all products of histories not of our making"

"Secular thought enables genuine respect for difference"