Tariq Ali

“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.”

“Revolutionaries are not infallible.”

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

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

“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 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.”