“Having an institutional blessing to be called a ‘writer’, ‘journalist’ or an ‘academic’ does not really make one so. In fact, anyone with institutional support and titles is a suspect more than anything else.”
“Fate does not control who walks into your life, but it does have an impact on who you meet. Then, you determine the extent they will become a part of your life.”
“In the area of Middle East Studies, you can always count on getting funding if your research is about minorities being treated horribly by ‘authoritarian regimes’ that the West want to topple, women oppressed and forced to wear the hijab, masculinity and femininity, gays are oppressed, refugees (provided that they are seeking safety in the West and running from a ‘dictator’ the West wants to topple), and so on. The pattern and the intentions are clear to a vigilant observer. What all such topics have in common is not that they are not important or need attention (they are so on both counts), but that their function is to maintain the West’s colonial and racist gaze on the rest of the world, which, in turn, serves the West’s hegemony and control over others.”
“It still shocks me to see countless academics who consider themselves intelligent, deep, or critical who constantly post and share articles from places like NYTimes, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and other such sources that, at the surface, appear to be intelligent, objective, and critical even of the power under which they operate (the Western elites), but if you dig deeper, you will discover that they are, one way or another, in perfect harmony with the imperial and colonial agenda of the West against the rest.”
“If anything, sources that have the support and protection of power and institutions should be treated as suspicious not superior. There are very few words that make me as nauseous as words like ‘prestige’ and ‘prestigious’. Prestige is often a shortcut for getting power’s approval and blessings, which automatically, in my view, should disqualify any intellectual from being taken seriously.”
“I have always maintained that genuine intellectuals, by definition, refuse to play any institutional games at any stage of their career or intellectual life. They can’t pretend to unsee once they see. They can’t ‘wait’ until they have tenure or enough power to ‘get away’ with things or be brave in their thinking and writing. A sincere thinker can’t fake or delay what they want to question, how, and the way in which they want to put it on paper. They can’t divide things into what can be said or done before or after tenure. A sincere thinker will die of a heart attack if they don’t research, write, and say what they want to say at the very moment they are ready to do it.”
“If control is the problem, then, by the logic of the Anthropocene, still more control must be the solution.”
“Here I was, trying to finish a book about the world spinning out of control, only to find the world spinning so far out of control that I couldn t finish the book.”
“There’s a difference between power and strength. You know what that is? Control.”
“Facebook started out as a social network, but now it’s so much more. A marketplace. A news and media platform. Control communication and you control the people communicating.”
“Control communication and you control the people communicating.”
“Your desire to protect me is noble, but I must be free to make my own choices. To control someone is not loving.”
“If he controls your ideas he will soon control your actions, because every action is preceded by an idea.”
“I kill it because we cannot stay in the same room. I kill it because we cannot stay in the same room with me sleeping. I kill it because I might look away and not see it there on the wall when I look back. I kill it because I might spend all night hunting it. I kill it because I am afraid to go near enough with glass and paper to carry it outside. I kill it because I have been told to. I kill it by slapping my shoe against the wall because I have been told to do it that way. I kill it standing as far away as possible and stretching my hand holding the shoe towards it. I kill it because it has been making me shake out the bedclothes, look inside my shoes, scan the walls at night. I kill it with two fast blows in case one isn’t enough. I kill it because I can. I kill it because it cannot stop me. I kill it because I know it is there. I kill it so that its remains are on the heel of my shoe. I kill it so that its outline with curved sting is on my wall. I kill it to feel sure I will live. I kill it to feel alive. I kill it because I am weaker than it is. I kill it because I am not good enough to let it live. I kill it out of the corner of my eye, remembering it is black, vertical, stock still on the white wall. I kill it because it will not speak to me.”
“When more time and energy is spent on trying to change or control what we can t, we are actually overlooking the real change that needs to happen within ourselves.”
“It s impossible to love someone and control them at the same time”
“You don’t have control over the money in your bank account. That s why the government hate Bitcoin and other blockchain-powered cryptocurrencies. Don’t forget that.”