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.
Interpretation
Engage actively with information rather than passively consuming it.
Edward Said emphasizes the importance of critical thinking and active engagement with ideas. He warns against becoming complacent and simply absorbing information without analysis, implying that all messages are shaped by ideology and should be scrutinized to understand their true meaning and context.
In practice
In a seminar about media literacy, to illustrate the importance of questioning sources.
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.
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.
Since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.
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.
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.
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.
No amount of energy will take the place of thought. A strenuous life with its eyes shut is a kind of wild insanity.
The discernment of a vocation is above all the fruit of an intimate dialogue between the Lord and his disciples. Young people, if they know how to pray, can be trusted to know what to do with God's call.
People are slow to claim confidence in undertakings of magnitude.
It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is true of men as of dogs.
Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.
I would not be young again, if you offered me the world. But then I'm prejudiced.' 'You talk,' I said, 'as if you were ninety-nine.' 'For a woman I very nearly am,' she said. 'I'm thirty five.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.