Edward W. Said

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

“All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.”

- Edward W. Said, born 1 November 1935.

Literary theorist who was a founding figure of the critical-theory field of Post-colonialism. Born a Palestinian Arab in Jerusalem, he was an American citizen through his father, and was a leading advocate for the political and human rights of the Palestinian people. As a cultural critic, academic, and writer, he is best known for the book Orientalism (1978), an analysis of the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism, a term he redefined to mean the Western study of Eastern cultures and, in general, the framework of how The West perceives and represents The East. He contended that Orientalist scholarship was, and remains, inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, which makes much of the work inherently political, servile to power, and therefore intellectually suspect. Orientalism, and his other thematically related works, proved influential in the fields of the humanities, especially in literary theory and in literary criticism. Orientalism proved especially influential upon the field of Middle Eastern studies.