In 1962, President Kennedy expanded an earlier trade embargo put in place by a predecessor, President Eisenhower, to a total economic blockade, which pushed the Cubans further in Moscow’s direction. – 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
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
The Pakistan Cricket Board is a long-standing joke, its chairmen replaced with every change of government. – 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
I am, in general, favourable to activism and social movements and hostile to graft and corruption. – Tariq Ali
Independence is the only way Scotland can realise its full political and cultural potential in the 21st century. – 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
The genealogy of fictional characters can become an obsession, like train-spotting, and should be firmly resisted. – Tariq Ali
Western enthusiasm for democracy stops when those opposed to its policies are elected to office. – 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
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
The human voice deployed to recite the Vedas and later aid the temple dancers was paramount before any instruments emerged. – 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
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
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
‘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
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
As a political current, Maoism was always weak in Britain, confined largely to students from Asia, Africa and Latin America. – 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
The patchwork political landscape of the Arab world – the client monarchies, degenerated nationalist dictatorships, and the imperial petrol stations known as the Gulf states – was the outcome of an intensive experience of Anglo-French colonialism. – 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
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
For India, the links with the United States/Israel are the centrepiece of its foreign policy. – Tariq Ali
In January 1961, the United States severed diplomatic relations in response to Cuban nationalisation of U.S.-owned sugar plantations, banks and businesses. – 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
