Tariq Ali Quotes

We live, after all, in a world where illusions are sacred and truth profane.

The function of a bourgeois democracy is to secure the consent of the masses to their own exploitation and oppression.

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."

There are different versions of Islam... it is meaningless to claim to speak in the name of a ‘real’ Islam.

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.

The sobbing of the weak today is the sobbing of the victims of neoliberal policies. They consist of billions of people all over the world.

Even if you reject everything, it is always better to know what it is you are rejecting.

After flirting with neoisolationism, the U.S. is now deciding it wants to run the world.

Desperation is the result of globalization.

American imperialism has always been the imperialism that has been frightened of speaking its name. Now it's beginning to do so. In a way, it's better. We know where we kneel.

One cannot discuss Europe without understanding US imperial hegemony, both globally and certainly in Europe as it stands.

At the time of German Reunification, it was no secret that Germany would soon become the strongest political entity in the European Union. And that has happened.

The "coalition against terrorism" means the United States. It does not wish anyone else to interfere with its strategy.

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

It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.

When a country is invaded and attacked and people resist it's important to speak up and to say they have the right to resist and to defend their right to resist.

During the Gulf War, journalists used to challenge government news managers and insisted they wouldn't just accept the official version of events.

The current Eurozone is obviously dysfunctional. And serious people within Germany and elsewhere know this to be the case and know things cannot function this way forever.

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

In the West, since the collapse of communism and the fall of the Soviet Union, the one discipline both the official and unofficial cultures have united in casting aside has been history.

Tragedies are always discussed as if they took place in a void, but actually each tragedy is conditioned by its setting, local and global. The events of 11 September 2001 are not exception.

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.

History, when they do it, is ancient history, and they sensationalize even that. Contemporary history is virtually ignored on television.

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.

I do think the Cubans have to change some of the political structures there and allow critical voices, for their own sakes, because unless there is accountability the revolution will totally atrophy.

Tony Blair is a war criminal.

I think the Americans fished out the same condom but found it had too many holes in it.

The United States is now The Empire. There isn't an empire; there's The Empire, and that empire is the United States.

The European Union has lost virtually all of its credibility amongst large swaths of the European population.

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

Most Iraqis, even if they hated Saddam and suffered, say life was much better under him than it was under the occupation and what's going on today.

There was a good moment in Islam when people were actually challenging authority at every level. Very different from the world we live in.

I've called David Cameron worse things than joker....and a former Prime Minister Tony Blair is widely referred to as a war criminal.

The extreme center is the political expression of the neoliberal state.

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.

I think the United States and its British attack dog are not taken seriously anywhere in the world and can play no role in helping a political solution.

Effectively, the EU is a very powerful bureaucracy, dominated now by the German elite, which is backed by the rest of the European Union members.

I think to compare Germany to the Third Reich is utterly ludicrous.

The past has too much knowledge embedded in it, and therefore it's best to forget it and start anew.

Basically, we are witnessing the twilight of democracy.

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.

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.

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

Independence is the only way Scotland can realise its full political and cultural potential in the 21st century.

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.