Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
History is written by those who win and those who dominate.
[9/11] was bloody-minded destruction for no other reason than to do it.
No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.
I don't myself believe in a two-state solution. I believe in a one-state solution.
I am for peace. And I am for a negotiated peace. But this accord is not a just peace.
Since when does a militarily occupied people have the responsibility for a peace movement?
Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.
The history of other cultures is non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.
When you become a public figure, you still think, 'That's really not me; there's more to me than that.'
Speaking as a New Yorker, I found [September 11] a shocking and terrifying event, particularly the scale of it.
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
We are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies. (p. 5)
In the Islamic world, the U.S. is seen in two quite different ways. One view recognizes what an extraordinary country the U.S. is.
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.
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.
Note that there was no claim for these attacks [on 9/11]. There were no demands. There were no statements. It was a silent piece of terror.
Since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.
[Mujahedeen], by the way, don't represent Islam in any formal sense. They're not imams or sheiks. They are self-appointed warriors for Islam.
I have been unable to live an uncommitted or suspended life. I have not hesitated to declare my affiliation with an extremely unpopular cause.
[One task of intellectuals is] to break down the stereotypes and reductive categories that are . . . limiting to human thought and communication.
[9/11] was not meant to be argued with. It wasn't part of any negotiation. No message was intended with it. It spoke for itself, which is unusual.
It was thought that to rally Islam against godless communism would be doing the Soviet Union a very bad turn indeed, and that, in fact, transpired.
But I do not know whether the photograph can, or does, say things as they really are. Something has been lost. But the representation is all we have.
There's been essentially the same analysis over and over again and very little allowance made for different views and interpretations and reflections.
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.
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.
Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.
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.
Osama bin Laden, who is a Saudi, feels himself to be a patriot because the U.S. has forces in Saudi Arabia, which is sacred because it is the land of the prophet Mohammed.
And in this relentlessly unfolding series of interactions, the U.S. has played a very distinctive role, which most Americans have been either shielded from or simply unaware of.
It's very hard, for example, to justify the thirty-four-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It's very hard to justify 140 Israeli settlements and roughly 400,000 settlers.
Speaking as a New Yorker, I found it (9/11 event] a shocking and terrifying event, particularly the scale of it. At bottom, it was an implacable desire to do harm to innocent people.
My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.
Ironically, many of people, including Osama bin Laden and the mujahedeen, were, in fact, nourished by the United States in the early eighties in its efforts to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
...it is sensible to begin by asking the beginning questions, why imagine power in the first place, and what is the relationship between one's motive for imagining power and the image one ends up with.
Ironically, many of these people, including Osama bin Laden and the mujahedeen, were, in fact, nourished by the United States in the early eighties in its efforts to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
What we must eliminate are systems of representation that carry with them the authority which has become repressive because it doesn't permit or make room for interventions on the part of those represented.
It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and 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.
Uninformed and yet open to appeals for justice as they are, Americans are capable of reacting as they did to the ANC campaign against apartheid, which finally changed the balance of forces inside South Africa.
The United States that has been involved first in the Gulf War and then in the tremendously damaging sanctions against Iraqi civilians. The United States that is the supporter of Israel against the Palestinians.
The other view is of the official United States, the United States of armies and interventions. The United States that in 1953 overthrew the nationalist government of Mossadegh in Iran and brought back the shah.
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.
Theory is taught so as to make the student believe that he or she can become a Marxist, a feminist, an Afrocentrist, or a deconstructionist with about the same effort and commitment required in choosing items from a menu.
If you live in the [Middle East] area, you see [U.S actions] as part of a continuing drive for dominance, and with it a kind of obduracy, a stubborn opposition to the wishes and desires and aspirations of the people there.
I emphasize in it [my Orientalism] accortdingly that neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other.
It [9/11 event] transcended the political and moved into the metaphysical. There was a kind of cosmic, demonic quality of mind at work here, which refused to have any interest in dialogue and political organization and persuasion.
These actions were taken with the support and financing of the United States. How can you say this is part of U.S. adherence to international law and U.N. resolutions? The result is a kind of schizophrenic picture of the United States.
This [9/11 event] was bloody-minded destruction for no other reason than to do it. Note that there was no claim for these attacks. There were no demands. There were no statements. It was a silent piece of terror. This was part of nothing.
To say that we're going to end countries or eradicate terrorism, and that it's a long war over many years, with many different instruments, suggests a much more complex and drawn-out conflict for which, I think, most Americans aren't prepared.