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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The Lumiere brothers first exhibited moving pictures in Paris in 1896. A year later, there was a private showing at the Yildiz palace in Istanbul. "

" 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. "

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

" Anthony Powell was the most European of 20th-century British novelists. "

" An independent Scotland could be far more internationalist and would benefit a great deal from links to both Scandinavia and states in other continents. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I am, in general, favourable to activism and social movements and hostile to graft and corruption. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Scandinavia was awash with Maoism in the '70s. Sweden had Maoist groups with a combined membership and periphery of several thousand members, but it was Norway where Maoism became a genuine popular force and hegemonic in the culture. "

" 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. "

" The Pakistan Cricket Board is a long-standing joke, its chairmen replaced with every change of government. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" To dissociate politicians from capitalists is slightly disingenuous, to put it mildly. U.S. lawmakers are competitive and auction themselves to the highest bidder via the lobby system. "

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

" I am not insulted by billions of Christians, Muslims and Jews believing there is a God and praying to this nonexistent deity on a regular basis. "

" 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. "

" In January 1961, the United States severed diplomatic relations in response to Cuban nationalisation of U.S.-owned sugar plantations, banks and businesses. "