"It seems a common human failing to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human." (S. 93)

"A text purporting to contain knowledge about something actual [...] is not easily dismissed. Expetrise is attributed to it. The authority of academics, institutions, and governments can accrue to it, surrounding it with still greater prestige than its practical success warrant. Most important such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe." (S. 94)

"I would not have undertaken a book of this sort if I did not also believe that there is scholarship that is not as corrupt, or at least as blind to human reality, as the kind I have been mainly depicting." (S. 326)

aus Orientalism. 1978.