Tariq Ali quotes - page 2

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. (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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Tariq Ali
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. View quote
Tariq Ali
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. View quote
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. View quote
Tariq Ali
I am, in general, favourable to activism and social movements and hostile to graft and corruption. View quote
Tariq Ali
Revolutionaries are not infallible. View quote
Tariq Ali
Independence is the only way Scotland can realise its full political and cultural potential in the 21st century. View quote
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)
As a political current, Maoism was always weak in Britain, confined largely to students from Asia, Africa and Latin America. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Tariq Ali
Western enthusiasm for democracy stops when those opposed to its policies are elected to office. View quote
Tariq Ali
In some ways, the '60s were a reaction to the '50s and the intensity of the Cold War. View quote
Tariq Ali
Pakistan, deprived of a viable left after the migration of Hindu and Sikh communists following Partition, gained a set of radical mass-circulation daily papers and journals which had no equal in neighbouring India or elsewhere in the continent. View quote
Tariq Ali
History handed Lenin a gift in the shapre of the First World War. He grasped it with both hands and used it to craft an insurrection. It is revolutions that make history happen. Liberals of every sort, with rare exceptions, are found on the other side. View quote
Tariq Ali
Revolutionary periods invariably encompass a huge fluctuation of political consciousness that can never be registered accurately by any referendum. (Tariq Ali)
Fractures in the state, divisions in the ruling class and indecision on the part of the intermediate classes pave the way for dual power, which, in Russia, led to the creation of new institutions and later, in China, Vietnam, and Cuba, rested on revolutionary armies with varying class compositions that were locked in battle against their respective state machines. View quote
Tariq Ali
Why is insurrection an art? Because an armed uprising against he capitalist state or occupying imperialist armies has to be choreographed with precision, especially during its final stages. View quote
Tariq Ali
The assassination of the Austrian crown prince by a Serbian nationalist was the trigger for the conflict, not the underlying cause, comparable in modern times to the explosions of 9/11 that provided the pretext for the war on Iraq, the destruction of Libya, Syria and the Yemen and the total destabilisation of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The post 9/11 wars have lasted longer than the First and Second Wars put together. View quote
Tariq Ali
Had the United States remained neutral, as a majority of the country wanted, a ceasefire and truce between the British and German empires would have been the only realistic solution. View quote
Tariq Ali