Tariq Ali Quotes
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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.
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I am, in general, favourable to activism and social movements and hostile to graft and corruption.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Western enthusiasm for democracy stops when those opposed to its policies are elected to office.
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I do not accept the right of big powers to change governments as and when it affects their interests.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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'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.
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I think democracy is on the decline in the West. Ruling parties are the same: neo-liberalism at home and wars abroad.
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In some ways, the '60s were a reaction to the '50s and the intensity of the Cold War.
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The human voice deployed to recite the Vedas and later aid the temple dancers was paramount before any instruments emerged.
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Independence is the only way Scotland can realise its full political and cultural potential in the 21st century.
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The origins of Indian classical music, not unlike their western counterparts, lie in the Vedas, the ancient Hindu scriptures of 2,000 years ago.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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For India, the links with the United States/Israel are the centrepiece of its foreign policy.
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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.
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For all their incoherence and senseless rage, their message is attractive to those layers of the population who yearn for some order in their lives. If the fanatics promise to feed them and educate their children they are prepared to forgo the delights of CNN and BBC World.
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The Pakistan Cricket Board is a long-standing joke, its chairmen replaced with every change of government.
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Power can shape 'truth,' but not forever.