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There is no getting around authority and power, and no getting around the intellectual's relationship to them. How does the intellectual address authority: as a professional supplicant or as its unrewarded, amateurish conscience?

— Edward Said

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Intelligence

More quotes by Edward Said

I’m interested in the tension between what is represented and what isn’t represented, between the articulate and the silent.

As a way of maintaining relative intellectual independence, having the attitude of an amateur instead of a professional is a better course.

The history of other cultures is non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.

Culture and Imperialism (1993)

I’ve always been interested in what gets left out.

When one learns something one first performs an act of will, because only by willing to learn can one learn.

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Each of these private teachers who work for pay ... inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom.

Socrates

Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.

Wilhelm Reich Philosophy : An Introduction to the Art of Wondering (2005)

Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël De l’Allemagne [Germany (1813)

Like every 'intellectual', a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois. When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois ideology that speaks: its resources and ruses are infinite.

Louis Althusser Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1968)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Edward Said (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.