Dipankar Sengupta

“There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes cannons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgements it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analysed.”
― Edward Said W

“Every human catastrophe, however, is archaeology's gain.”
― Robert Garland , The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World

“For there is no doubt that imaginative geography and history hello the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatising the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away.”
― Edward Said W

“If the first requirement of a civilisation is the possession of its own language, the second must be the pursuit of a literary tradition. Books are, in historian Barbara Tuchman's words, the carriers of civilisation.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation