Time & Perspective Quote by Edward Said

A line like this is engineered to provoke a flinch - and then force a reckoning with what passes for “knowledge.” Said’s move is deliberately sweeping: “every European” since Homer. The point isn’t statistical precision; it’s to name a civilizational habit so entrenched it disappears into common sense. By reaching back to Homer, he frames Orientalism not as a 19th-century colonial glitch but as a foundational storyline in Europe’s self-making, a long-running epic where “the Orient” functions less as a place than as a mirror: exotic, backward, sensual, despotic - whatever Europe needs in order to define itself as rational, modern, and fit to rule.

The intent is accusatory but also methodological. Said is warning readers that Western representations of the East are not innocent descriptions; they’re part of an apparatus of power. “Racist, imperialist, ethnocentric” reads like a charge sheet, but the deeper subtext is about authorship and authority: who gets to speak for whom, and what institutions (literature, scholarship, travel writing, statecraft) make those descriptions feel objective.

Context matters: Said is writing in the late Cold War, after formal decolonization but amid ongoing intervention and media stereotyping. Orientalism (1978) lands as both literary criticism and political diagnosis. The sting of the sentence is its refusal to let cultured admiration off the hook. Even “sympathetic” portraits can still stage the East as Europe’s curated other, a text to be interpreted, managed, and possessed.