Tariq Ali

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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 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.”

“It is as difficult to define or classify Islamic cinema as it would be a Christian, Jewish or Buddhist one.”

“In my eyes, a patriot is little more than an international blackleg.”

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