Words matter. These are the best Tariq Ali Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
The human voice deployed to recite the Vedas and later aid the temple dancers was paramount before any instruments emerged.
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.
I think democracy is on the decline in the West. Ruling parties are the same: neo-liberalism at home and wars abroad.
In some ways, the ’60s were a reaction to the ’50s and the intensity of the Cold War.
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.
It is as difficult to define or classify Islamic cinema as it would be a Christian, Jewish or Buddhist one.
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.
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.
I am, in general, favourable to activism and social movements and hostile to graft and corruption.
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.
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.
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.
Revolutionaries are not infallible.
‘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.
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.
History rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away.
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.
The only continent where social movements have led to political parties that have pushed through serious social and political reforms is in South America.
The Pakistan Cricket Board is a long-standing joke, its chairmen replaced with every change of government.
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.
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.
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.
Socially, the Cuban revolution created an education system and health service that remain the envy of much of the neo-liberal world.
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.
Those who really value Ukrainian sovereignty should opt for real independence and a positive neutrality: neither a plaything of the West nor Moscow.
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.
As a political current, Maoism was always weak in Britain, confined largely to students from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
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.
Exploiters and manipulators have always used religion self-righteously to further their own selfish ends.
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.
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.
