Tariq Ali Quotes & Sayings

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. — Tariq Ali

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

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. — Tariq Ali

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

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. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

As a political current, Maoism was always weak in Britain, confined largely to students from Asia, Africa and Latin America. — Tariq Ali

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

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

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. — Tariq Ali

If you see what passes as the news on the networks in the United States, there's virtually no coverage of the rest of the world, not even of neighboring countries like Mexico or neighboring continents like Latin America. — Tariq Ali

There was a good moment in Islam when people were actually challenging authority at every level. Very different from the world we live in. — Tariq Ali

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

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. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

I think the big tragedy of the Cuban Revolution was that it became dependent on the Soviet Union, and it became dependent on the Soviet Union under a very reactionary bureaucratic regime led by Leonid Brezhnev. — Tariq Ali

We have populations now in the West with a very short memory span. One reason for this short memory span is that television over the last fifteen years has seen a big decline in the coverage of the rest of the world. — Tariq Ali

The main implication is a remapping of the world in line with American policy and American interests. Natural resources are limited, and the United States wants to make sure that its own population is kept supplied. The principle effect of this will be for the United States to control large parts of the oil which the world possesses. — Tariq Ali

Journalists go to press briefings at the Ministry of Defense in London or the Pentagon in Washington, and no critical questions are posed at all. It's just a news-gathering operation, and the fact that the news is being given by governments who are waging war doesn't seem to worry many journalists too much. — Tariq Ali

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

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. — Tariq Ali

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

Even if you reject everything, it is always better to know what it is you are rejecting. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

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

The weakness in traditional Scottish nationalism lay in its own inability to grasp that identity could not be the only factor in the march to independence. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

American imperialism has always been the imperialism that has been frightened of speaking its name. Now it's beginning to do so. In a way, it's better. We know where we kneel. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

The past has too much knowledge embedded in it, and therefore it's best to forget it and start anew. — Tariq Ali

The origins of Indian classical music, not unlike their western counterparts, lie in the Vedas, the ancient Hindu scriptures of 2,000 years ago. — Tariq Ali

The implication strongly is that Osama bin Laden is a Hitler, even though he has no state power at all. It's just grotesque if you seriously think about it. — Tariq Ali

Scandinavia was awash with Maoism in the '70s. Sweden had Maoist groups with a combined membership and periphery of several thousand members, but it was Norway where Maoism became a genuine popular force and hegemonic in the culture. — Tariq Ali

After flirting with neoisolationism, the U.S. is now deciding it wants to run the world. — Tariq Ali

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

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. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

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

The Internet has been an invaluable acquisition. I wonder how we would do without it. Information can be sent from one country to the other within the space of minutes, crossing channels, crossing oceans, crossing continents. But still, we can't compete with the might and power and wealth of those who dominate, control, and own the means of the production of information today. — Tariq Ali

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

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. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

The Pakistan Cricket Board is a long-standing joke, its chairmen replaced with every change of government. — Tariq Ali

To fight tyranny and oppression by using tyrannical and oppressive means, to combat a single-minded and ruthless fanaticism by becoming equally fanatical and ruthless, will not further the cause of justice or bring about a meaningful democracy. It can only prolong the cycle of violence. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

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

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

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. — Tariq Ali

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

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. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

There are, of course, deeply sincere people of religion in different parts of the world who genuinely fight on the side of the poor, but they are usually in conflict with organised religion themselves. — Tariq Ali

THERE CAN BE FEW delights in the world as pleasant as a Siracusan spring. The fragrance of the lemon, orange, apricot, almond and peach blossoms pervade the city, enriched by the moist, salty sea breezes. On — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

The U.S. should come out openly and say to the world, "We are the only imperial power, and we're going to rule you, and if you don't like it you can lump it." — Tariq Ali

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

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. — Tariq Ali

I think the Americans fished out the same condom but found it had too many holes in it. — Tariq Ali

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

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. — Tariq Ali

Desperation is the result of globalization. — Tariq Ali

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

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

'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. — Tariq Ali

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

Socially, the Cuban revolution created an education system and health service that remain the envy of much of the neo-liberal world. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

[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. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

Power can shape 'truth,' but not forever. — Tariq Ali

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

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

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. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

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." — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights. — Tariq Ali

Those who really value Ukrainian sovereignty should opt for real independence and a positive neutrality: neither a plaything of the West nor Moscow. — Tariq Ali

The war in Afghanistan, the first war of the twenty-first century, shows the United States doing what it wants to do, not caring about who it antagonizes, not caring about the effects on neighboring regions. — Tariq Ali

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

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. — Tariq Ali

Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan were self-proclaimed atheists. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

Revolutionaries are not infallible. — Tariq Ali

I think democracy is on the decline in the West. Ruling parties are the same: neo-liberalism at home and wars abroad. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

Tragedies are always discussed as if they took place in a void, but actually each tragedy is conditioned by its setting, local and global. The events of 11 September 2001 are not exception. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

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. — Tariq Ali

In times of crisis, the incumbent suffers. And the bigger the crisis, the greater the punishment inflicted on those in power unless they do something that makes a change. — Tariq Ali