Tariq Ali Quotes

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Tariq Ali

Profession : Historian

Birth : October 21, 1943

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

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

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

Power can shape 'truth,' but not forever.

Tariq Ali

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revolutionaries are not infallible.

Tariq Ali

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

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

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

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