Tariq Ali Quotes - 9quotes.com

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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.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by Tariq Ali
Revolutionaries are not infallible.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by Tariq Ali
In my eyes, a patriot is little more than an international blackleg.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by Tariq Ali
Independence is the only way Scotland can realise its full political and cultural potential in the 21st century.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by Tariq Ali
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.
Written by Tariq Ali
As a political current, Maoism was always weak in Britain, confined largely to students from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by Tariq Ali
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.
Written by 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.
Written by Tariq Ali
The human voice deployed to recite the Vedas and later aid the temple dancers was paramount before any instruments emerged.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by Tariq Ali
I am, in general, favourable to activism and social movements and hostile to graft and corruption.
Written by 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.
Written by Tariq Ali
For India, the links with the United States/Israel are the centrepiece of its foreign policy.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by Tariq Ali
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.
Written by Tariq Ali

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