Tariq Ali Quotes

That natural disasters are required to provide Americans with a glimpse of reality in their own country is an indication of the deep rot infecting the official political culture.

We live, after all, in a world where illusions are sacred and truth profane.

The sobbing of the weak today is the sobbing of the victims of neoliberal policies. They consist of billions of people all over the world.

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

Western enthusiasm for democracy stops when those opposed to its policies are elected to office.

During the Gulf War, journalists used to challenge government news managers and insisted they wouldn't just accept the official version of events.

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.

The United States is now The Empire. There isn't an empire; there's The Empire, and that empire is the United States.

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.

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.

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.

I think the United States and its British attack dog are not taken seriously anywhere in the world and can play no role in helping a political solution.

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.

The only continent where social movements have led to political parties that have pushed through serious social and political reforms is in South America.

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.

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.

Young women and men who joined the far-left groups did so for the best of reasons. They wanted to change the world. Many fought against the stifling atmosphere in many groups.

In my eyes, a patriot is little more than an international blackleg.

In January 1961, the United States severed diplomatic relations in response to Cuban nationalisation of U.S.-owned sugar plantations, banks and businesses.

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 Enlightenment attacked religion - Christianity, mainly - for two reasons: that it was a set of ideological delusions, and that it was a system of institutional oppression, with immense powers of persecution and intolerance.

The U.S. is telling the Northern Alliance to kill Taliban prisoners. It's totally a breach of all the known conventions of war. Western television networks aren't showing this, but Arab networks are showing how prisoners are being killed and what's being done to them. Instead, we're shown scenes that are deliberately created for the Western media: a few women without the veil, a woman reading the news on Kabul television, and 150 people cheering.

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 whole history of the 20th century is a history of resistance groups which are either nationalist or, in large parts of the Muslim word, religious groups.

In every twenty-four hours there is always one which is full of anguish and self-pity and confusion and the desire to see other faces, but an hour passes quickly enough.

I do not accept the right of big powers to change governments as and when it affects their interests.

Poland, after the First World War, was beset by chaos, disorder, and a foolish incursion by the Red Army, which helped to produce the ultra-nationalist military dictatorship of General Pilsudski.

Revolutionaries are not infallible.

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

In many parts of the Islamic world, secular forces, where they exist, tend to be so unsure of themselves, so lacking in self-confidence, that in many cases they line themselves up fairly squarely behind the imperial project and that then creates a big vacuum in which the Islamists become the dominant power because they are the only ones then who are seen as resisting.

The "coalition against terrorism" means the United States. It does not wish anyone else to interfere with its strategy.

Terrorism emanates from weakness, not strength. It is the sign of despair.

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

I do think the Cubans have to change some of the political structures there and allow critical voices, for their own sakes, because unless there is accountability the revolution will totally atrophy.

The genealogy of fictional characters can become an obsession, like train-spotting, and should be firmly resisted.

It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.

Indian classical music was born when time barely existed. It developed further within the structures of royal courts and a system of patronage where the ruler or the feudal master determined all.

I am not insulted by billions of Christians, Muslims and Jews believing there is a God and praying to this nonexistent deity on a regular basis.

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.

People are increasingly beginning to feel that democracy itself is being destroyed by this latest phase of globalization and that politics doesn't matter because it changes nothing.

The function of a bourgeois democracy is to secure the consent of the masses to their own exploitation and oppression.

The Lumiere brothers first exhibited moving pictures in Paris in 1896. A year later, there was a private showing at the Yildiz palace in Istanbul.

Desperation is the result of globalization.

The heathen could only be eliminated as a force if their culture was completely erased.

All these wars are similar in the way ideology is being used. It's the ideology of so-called humanitarian intervention. We don't want to do this, but we're doing this for the sake of the people who live there. This is, of course, a terrible sleight of hand because all sorts of people live there, and, by and large, they do it to help one faction and not the other.

Monotonous talk of the end of American hegemony, the universal cliché of the period, is mostly a way of avoiding mounting a serious opposition to 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.

As long as the Pentagon bankrolls the Pakistan army to fight its wars, and NATO troops remain in Afghanistan, there will be quarrels, charges of infidelity, a reduction in the household allowance, perhaps a separation - but a divorce? Never.

I understand you only too well, but Rachel's needs are no less important than your desire to be part of history. Find a balance. Happiness is like good health. You only miss it when it disappears.

As a candidate, Obama projected himself as a new Reagan, above narrow party politics. He wanted to please all but has ended up annoying many.

In the West, since the collapse of communism and the fall of the Soviet Union, the one discipline both the official and unofficial cultures have united in casting aside has been history.

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.

An independent Scotland could be far more internationalist and would benefit a great deal from links to both Scandinavia and states in other continents.

Exploiters and manipulators have always used religion self-righteously to further their own selfish ends.

Dear old al-Maarri was a great skeptic poet. He wrote a parody of the Koran, and his friends would tease him and say, "al-Maarri, but no one says your Koran." And he said, "Yes, but give me time. Give me time. If people recite it for twenty years it will become as popular as the other one."

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.

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

The only decent daily paper of record in France is the online 'Mediapart,' which exposes graft and corruption in high places and is feared by the establishment.

Gamal Abdal Nasser, the nationalist leader of Egypt, was described by British Prime Minister Anthony Eden as an Egyptian Hitler. Then it carried on like that. Saddam Hussein became Hitler when he was no longer a friend of the West. Then Milosevic became Hitler.

When a country is invaded and attacked and people resist it's important to speak up and to say they have the right to resist and to defend their right to resist.

Oh my son," sighed Ama. "I was talking to the shadows of the pomegranate trees. At least they will be here when we are all gone.

This is the permanent tension that lies at the heart of a capitalist democracy and is exacerbated in times of crisis. In order to ensure the survival of the richest, it is democracy that has to be heavily regulated rather than capitalism.

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.

If every single Jew born anywhere in the world has the right to become an Israeli citizen, then all the Palestinians who were chucked out of Palestine by the Zionist Government should have the same right, very simple.

[Taken from a BBC documentary]
Tariq was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, then part of British-ruled India, in 1943. A Catholic school education did nothing to shake his life-long atheism, which he shared with his communist parents.

History, when they do it, is ancient history, and they sensationalize even that. Contemporary history is virtually ignored on television.

'Theogony' should be read before the great Homeric epics because it gives an account of the cosmology that is taken for granted by Homer. It does for paganism what the Old Testament attempted to do for monotheism.

I am an atheist and do not know the meaning of the 'religious pain' that is felt by believers of every cast when what they believe in is insulted.

Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.

It's a total failure of the Western imagination that the only enemy they can see is Adolph Hitler.