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" 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. "

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" When Pakistan was carved out of India's rib in 1947, it was assumed by some that Bollywood's Muslim stars would defect to the new state and thus boost the Lahore film industry. But Lollywood did not happen. "

Tariq Ali

Out

New

India

" 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 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. "

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

Tariq Ali

Activism

Social

" Revolutionaries are not infallible. "

Tariq Ali

Infallible

Revolutionaries

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I am an atheist and do not know the meaning of the 'religious pain' that is felt by believers of every cast when what they believe in is insulted. "

" Power can shape 'truth,' but not forever. "

" 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. "

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

" As a candidate, Obama projected himself as a new Reagan, above narrow party politics. He wanted to please all but has ended up annoying many. "

Tariq Ali

Party

New

" 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. "

" History rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away. "

Tariq Ali

Never

Away

" 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 genealogy of fictional characters can become an obsession, like train-spotting, and should be firmly resisted. "

Tariq Ali

Become

Characters

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" The cinematic language and interior destiny of each Iranian film-maker is different. The international influences on them vary from Rossellini to Fellini, Akira Kurosawa to Hou Hsiao-hsien, but there is a strong sense of solidarity. "

" 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. "

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

" We were constantly appealing for funds from readers when I edited 'The Black Dwarf' in 1968-69. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I don't regret what I did in the Sixties. I was young and took myself terribly seriously. In the Seventies, I spent too much time in inner-party factional disputes. "

" Socially, the Cuban revolution created an education system and health service that remain the envy of much of the neo-liberal world. "