20-years-ago, we lost one of the greatest intellectual minds of our generation, Edward Said. The Palestinian-American academic, literary critic, and champion of the Palestinian cause who died aged 67 after a long battle with leukemia on Sep. 25, 2003, played a critical role in bringing the marginalized Arab voice to the forefront. Revered all over the world for his work on critical theory and culture, particularly his seminal work Orientalism, one of the most influential scholarly books of the 20th century, the former Columbia University professor may be gone, but he will certainly never be forgotten. Leaving behind a trove of in-depth theories, profound quotes, and thought-provoking ideas, the Jerusalem-born activist’s work remains a timeless treasure, continuously enriching our understanding of the world and our role within it. A true revolutionary, his passing has left a huge hole in the contemporary world. In honor of the late intellectual giant, we decided to round up some of his best and most profound quotes.
“History is written by those who win and those who dominate.”
“We can not fight for our rights and 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.”
“Beginning is not only a kind of action. It is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness.”
“You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once— there has to be a limit.”
“Where cruelty and injustice are concerned, hopelessness is submission, which I believe is immoral.”
“The Arabic language in my opinion is one of the most extraordinary constructions of the human mind.”
“Since when does a militarily occupied people have the responsibility for a peace movement?”
“Refuse to allow yourself to become a vegetable that simply absorbs information, pre-packaged, pre-ideologized, because no message is anything but an ideological package that has gone through a kind of processing.”
“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.”
“No cause, No God, No abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.”
