Top 30 Tariq Ali Quotes

In 1962, President Kennedy expanded an earlier trade embargo put in place by a predecessor, President Eisenhower, to a total economic blockade, which pushed the Cubans further in Moscow‘s direction.

I am, in general, favourable to activism and social movements and hostile to graft and corruption.

I was in my mid-teens when someone gave me a copy of ‘Pears Encyclopaedia of Myth and Legends‘ as a birthday present. It sat on my shelves for many months before I looked at it. When I did, I couldn’t stop reading it.

There is no real agreement among scholars as to whether Homer and Hesiod were contemporaries or whether Homer came a hundred or so years later or earlier. How could there be, given that both poets recited and sang in an oral culture.

History rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away.

The hostility between India and Pakistan has become a habit to which both the elites have become addicted. Any attempt towards a rational solution to real problems is denounced by chauvinists on both sides.

The cinematic language and interior destiny of each Iranian film-maker is different. The international influences on them vary from Rossellini to Fellini, Akira Kurosawa to Hou Hsiao-hsien, but there is a strong sense of solidarity.

Revolutionaries are not infallible.

When Pakistan was carved out of India’s rib in 1947, it was assumed by some that Bollywood‘s Muslim stars would defect to the new state and thus boost the Lahore film industry. But Lollywood did not happen.

Scotland‘s political identity was destroyed, and a huge Scottish emigration to North America followed the brutal Highland clearances. These included every layer of Scottish society, not just the remnants of the defeated clans.

I don’t regret what I did in the Sixties. I was young and took myself terribly seriously. In the Seventies, I spent too much time in inner-party factional disputes.

In the calculus of western interests, there is no suffering, whatever its scale, which cannot be justified. Chechens, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis are of little importance.

A storm swept the world in 1968. It started in Vietnam, then blew across Asia, crossing the sea and the mountains to Europe and beyond. A brutal war waged by the U.S. against a poor southeast Asian country was seen every night on television.

Independence is the only way Scotland can realise its full political and cultural potential in the 21st century.

For India, the links with the United States/Israel are the centrepiece of its foreign policy.

The human voice deployed to recite the Vedas and later aid the temple dancers was paramount before any instruments emerged.

An act of unilateral nuclear disarmament by a European power would have a much more lasting impact than all the sanctions under consideration. Sanctions, as we know from the example of Iraq, always affect the least powerful citizens the most.

The Greek city-states politicised citizen and subject, creating institutions that were way ahead of anything in China or India. The politicians of antiquity exercised a political and military, if not economic, hegemony on the culture as a whole. The idea of democracy was first born and practised here.

When I arrived to study at Oxford in October 1963, the bohemian style was black plastic or leather jackets for women and black leather or navy donkey jackets for men. I stuck to cavalry twills and a duffle coat, at least for a few months.

Anthony Powell was the most European of 20th-century British novelists.

The patchwork political landscape of the Arab world – the client monarchies, degenerated nationalist dictatorships, and the imperial petrol stations known as the Gulf states – was the outcome of an intensive experience of Anglo-French colonialism.

Political pundits in Delhi and Islamabad have berated the West for its relativism and double-standards. After all why should Britain have a nuclear arsenal but not India? It is a reasonable question.

I didn’t know a thing about Oxford and had never been to Britain. My father suggested it because in 1939 he had been about to take up a place at Wadham College, but the war broke out, and he joined the Army instead.

In the Seventies, we still had dreams and hopes of Utopia, but by the end of the decade, the world had shifted to the right.

In some ways, the ’60s were a reaction to the ’50s and the intensity of the Cold War.

To dissociate politicians from capitalists is slightly disingenuous, to put it mildly. U.S. lawmakers are competitive and auction themselves to the highest bidder via the lobby system.

Ralph Miliband was a socialist intellectual of great integrity. He belonged to a generation of socialists formed by the Russian revolution and the Second World War, a generation that dominated left-wing politics for almost a century.

We were constantly appealing for funds from readers when I edited ‘The Black Dwarf‘ in 1968-69.

I am fully aware of the concept of political revolutions. After all, that is what we hoped might happen in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe, but what actually happened was capitalist restoration.

I was never totally what we would now call ‘politically correct,’ even in my most militant phase. I always liked good food, good wines. I suppose it was because I had total confidence in myself.