Tariq Ali Quotes

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Tariq Ali

Profession : Historian

Birth : October 21, 1943

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.

Tariq Ali

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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

'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

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

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

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

For India, the links with the United States/Israel are the centrepiece of its foreign policy.

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

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

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

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

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