75 Quotes by Tariq Ali

Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.

This is the permanent tension that lies at the heart of a capitalist democracy and is exacerbated in times of crisis. In order to ensure the survival of the richest, it is democracy that has to be heavily regulated rather than capitalism.

That natural disasters are required to provide Americans with a glimpse of reality in their own country is an indication of the deep rot infecting the official political culture.

It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.

Monotonous talk of the end of American hegemony, the universal cliché of the period, is mostly a way of avoiding mounting a serious opposition to it.

The heathen could only be eliminated as a force if their culture was completely erased.

Vlady smiled to himself. He was fifty-six today. What had loomed in the distance like a giant iceberg had finally caught up with him, but he had survived the encounter. He was still alive. Despite everything, he had not thrown himself under a train. He was still there and that was enough reason to celebrate.

[Taken from a BBC documentary]Tariq was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, then part of British-ruled India, in 1943. A Catholic school education did nothing to shake his life-long atheism, which he shared with his communist parents.

Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan were self-proclaimed atheists.