Speaking As A New Yorker, I Found

Every Single Empire In Its Official Discourse Has Said That It Is Not Like All The Others, That Its Circumstances Are Special, That It Has A Mission To Enlighten, Civilize, Bring Order And Democracy, And That It Uses Force Only As A Last Resort. And, Sadder Still, There Always Is A Chorus Of Willing Intellectuals To Say Calming Words About Benign Or Altruistic Empires.

History Is Written By Those Who Win And Those Who Dominate.

My Argument Is That History Is Made By Men And Women, Just As It Can Also Be Unmade And Rewritten, Always With Various Silence And Elisions, Always With Shapes Imposed And Disfigurements Tolerated.

Most Arabs And Muslims Feel That The United States Hasn't Really Been Paying Much Attention To Their Desires. They Think It Has Been Pursuing Its Policies For Its Own Sake And Not According To Many Of The Principles That It Claims Are Its Own - Democracy, Self-determination, Freedom Of Speech, Freedom Of Assembly, International Law.

The Central Fact For Me Is, I Think, That The [role Of The] Intellectual... Cannot Be Played Without A Sense Of Being Someone Whose Place It Is Publicly To Raise Embarrassing Questions, To Confront Orthodoxy And Dogma (rather Than To Produce Them), To Be Someone Who Cannot Easily Be Co-opted By Governments Or Corporations, And Whose Raison D'etre Is To Represent All Those People And Issues That Are Routinely Forgotten Or Swept Under The Rug.