Edward Said Quotes

What Gramsci is all about is hegemony: you win the battle of ideas and it dominates.

'Prison Notebooks' gives me a basic understanding of how power can influence people through cultural products and intellectual groups, so they will voluntarily support the hegemony.

My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things.

Nothing the European mind ever devised was meant to do anything but to facilitate the European's control over the world.

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

Old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

Power is being able to affect the hegemony of existing systems.

The ideology of a ruling class is of little use unless it is accepted by those being ruled.

Society is made of words, whose meanings the powerful control, or try to.

People who bear the brunt of dominant economic and military power have always resented, even hated, the subordination they experience while admiring grudgingly the institutions that sustain the subordination.

I myself am a descendant of the European tribes, now called nations, that have established political, military, and economic dominance over the world. I confess to my sin of privilege and my reluctance to forego the perks my race and class afford me.

I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves; that's the most dangerous kind of censorship - that's how hegemony works.

History teaches me that the dollar rules and whoever writes history writes it however they want.

One cannot discuss Europe without understanding US imperial hegemony, both globally and certainly in Europe as it stands.

The general principle is that the victors don't look at themselves or concede anything. The defeated typically have to, except when it's beneficial to the powerful for them not to.

The supremacy of public opinion determines not only the singular role that economics occupies in the complex of thought and knowledge. It determines the whole process of human history.

Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.

I think U.S. and China is a big opportunity, to be seen as partner or some kind of strategic partner maybe. But those kind of powers have a way of getting too big, then we'll have competition. And who is going to win the competition if U.S. cannot hold a strong ideology? And even the U.S. would've lost the ground to win.

Western interests: imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, racism, and other negative -isms.

Wordsmiths who serve established power...castrate the public imagination by subjecting language to a complexity which renders it private. Elitism is always their aim.

Today science prevails not because of its comparative merits, but because the show has been rigged in its favour... It reigns supreme because some past successes have led to institutional measures (education; role of experts; role of power groups such as the AMA) that prevent a comeback of the rivals.

It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time

The oppressor has always indoctrinated the weak with his interpretation of the crimes of the strong.

The Achaeans soon experienced, as often happens, that a victorious and powerful ally is but another name for a master.

It occurred to Dr. Lecter in the moment that with all his knowledge and intrusion, he could never entirely predict her, or own her at all. He could feed the caterpillar, he could whisper through the chrysalis; what hatched out followed its own nature and was beyond him. He wondered if she had the .45 on her leg beneath the gown. Clarice Starling smiled at him then, the cabochons caught the firelight and the monster was lost in self-congratulation at his own exquisite taste and cunning.