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

Tariq Ali

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Tariq Ali
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: October 21
Film Director
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Peace Activist
Politician
Screenwriter
Writer
Everything
Even
Always
Rejecting
Reject
Rejects
Better

More quotes by Tariq Ali

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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.
Tariq Ali
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The United States is now The Empire. There isn't an empire there's The Empire, and that empire is the United States.
Tariq Ali
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There are huge political problems in Germany, but German economic power is something which was bound to happen. The way out of this situation is through the further democratization of the European Union and a changing of its structures.
Tariq Ali
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What we are seeing in Turkey is a non-uniformed authoritarian regime led by a politician, Tayyip Erdogan, who has allowed power to go to his head and is behaving more and more like a despot. Sooner or later this will provoke political uprisings throughout the country as happened after Gezi.
Tariq Ali
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The European Union is a union of the extreme center. It's a banker's union. You see how they operate in country after country, appointing technocrats to take over and run countries for long periods. They did it in Greece they did it in Italy they considered it in other parts of Europe.
Tariq Ali
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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.
Tariq Ali
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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.
Tariq Ali
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To fight tyranny and oppression by using tyrannical and oppressive means, to combat a single-minded and ruthless fanaticism by becoming equally fanatical and ruthless, will not further the cause of justice or bring about a meaningful democracy. It can only prolong the cycle of violence.
Tariq Ali
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The function of a bourgeois democracy is to secure the consent of the masses to their own exploitation and oppression.
Tariq Ali
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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.
Tariq Ali
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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.
Tariq Ali
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The judgement makes no sense at all. It exposes the country, Turkey, to ridicule. It would have been so much better if Ahmet Davotgulu had behaved like a medieval jester, but no such luck for poor Turkey. Its Prime Minister is not taken seriously by too many people.
Tariq Ali
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There was a good moment in Islam when people were actually challenging authority at every level. Very different from the world we live in.
Tariq Ali
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One could think of ways to defeat the censor. I could put up the answers on my Facebook page or website or Counterpunch. In today's world it's not easy to suppress information. Technology has helped us a great deal.
Tariq Ali
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As for ISIS, we know where they come from. We know who has used them in the past. We know their sectarianism leads to killings. Here the Turkish state, like its NATO bosses, has helped to create a monster that it now claims to oppose.
Tariq Ali
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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.
Tariq Ali
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Terrorism emanates from weakness, not strength. It is the sign of despair.
Tariq Ali
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Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.
Tariq Ali
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Desperation is the result of globalization.
Tariq Ali
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Dear old al-Maarri was a great skeptic poet. He wrote a parody of the Koran, and his friends would tease him and say, al-Maarri, but no one says your Koran. And he said, Yes, but give me time. Give me time. If people recite it for twenty years it will become as popular as the other one.
Tariq Ali