Top 48 Quotes by Tahar Ben Jelloun

Intellectuals try to keep going. But their situation is very difficult. Those who have had the courage to voice their opposition have often paid a very high price.

We have no Arab intellectuals of international stature because we live in a state of generalized mediocrity. We are suspended in the pit without touching the bottom.

At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets.

What have we achieved since the end of the Second World War? We have allowed petty, bourgeois regimes in which everything is average, mediocre.

An individual voice can be heard in a choir that otherwise sings in unison. This is something that is not excused.

In the '70s I was in exile; every time I went back I wondered if they'd take my passport away.

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.

People must insist on the right to say no, to be alone, to stand out from the herd. Creative artists can say all this in their own way and in their own field, by hard, rigorous work.

It is impossible to disregard such an important medium as television. We should know how to use it, learn to work in it and express new values in it.

The world does not look to us in the Arab world out of a healthy desire for knowledge.