Edward Said

"The study of history shows us that the world we inhabit is the product of human choices."

"Language is not merely a tool for expressing ideas; it is itself a form of power."

"To resist is not only possible; it is the very condition of intellectual life."

"The intellectual owes a debt to those who came before and to those who will come after."

"The intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public."

"Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and 'the Occident.'"

"Culture is a concept that includes a refining and elevating element, a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development."

"The worldliness of all texts is not.. an inescapable condition of human existence; rather, it is an interpretive strategy."

"One should as a rule respect public privacy. On the other hand, the major poets are always at the center of the public drama of their times."

"Humanism is at its best a very complicated and actually fragile thing."

"All cultural forms are hybrid, mixed, of no 'pure' origin at all."

"The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism."

"Secular criticism must begin by taking seriously and literally the effort required to speak of secular things in a secular way."

"There is no use in trying to prescribe to human beings in cultures different from one's own."

"The author or the intellectual is not a package containing ideology, to be delivered wholesale to the public."

"To be an intellectual in the Islamic world, in the Arab world, is a difficult vocation."

"Affiliation can be understood as the consequence of having actively assumed a cultural, national, or racial identity."

"An intellectual has a responsibility to use that power as honestly and as powerfully as possible."

"The colonial writer who attempts to speak of culture is immediately caught in the web of ideological presuppositions."

"Culture is not monolithic; it is always contested, always being made and remade."

"All resistance is not equal and all oppression is not the same."

"We are responsible for our representations of the other, and we cannot simply represent them however we please."

"Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience."

"The relationship between culture and imperialism is extraordinarily direct."

"Knowledge and power come together in representation."

"Being 'out of place' is the intellectual's natural condition."

"Humanism must now face the great task of actually encompassing the whole of humanity."

"True commitment to anti-imperialism requires understanding the world systematically."

"The past is not simply the past but also a point of reference, a point of departure."

"Literature is not just about individual psychology but about society and history."