Quotes from Tariq Ali

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

People are increasingly beginning to feel that democracy itself is being destroyed by this latest phase of globalization and that politics doesn't matter because it changes nothing.

Those who really value Ukrainian sovereignty should opt for real independence and a positive neutrality: neither a plaything of the West nor Moscow.

The U.S. should come out openly and say to the world, "We are the only imperial power, and we're going to rule you, and if you don't like it you can lump it."

The whole history of the 20th century is a history of resistance groups which are either nationalist or, in large parts of the Muslim word, religious groups.

It's a total failure of the Western imagination that the only enemy they can see is Adolph Hitler.

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

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.

The implication strongly is that Osama bin Laden is a Hitler, even though he has no state power at all. It's just grotesque if you seriously think about it.

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.

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.

The origins of Indian classical music, not unlike their western counterparts, lie in the Vedas, the ancient Hindu scriptures of 2,000 years ago.

Western enthusiasm for democracy stops when those opposed to its policies are elected to office.

I do not accept the right of big powers to change governments as and when it affects their interests.

The Enlightenment attacked religion - Christianity, mainly - for two reasons: that it was a set of ideological delusions, and that it was a system of institutional oppression, with immense powers of persecution and intolerance.

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

'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.

Terrorism emanates from weakness, not strength. It is the sign of despair.

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