A Quote by Tariq Ali

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

Tariq Ali

Quote Topics

Abroad Decline Democracy Home Liberalism Parties Ruling Same Think Wars West

Quote Author

Tariq Ali
Pakistani - Historian
Born: October 21, 1943

What if democracy does not serve liberty? This question is seldom asked in the West, where democracy is often seen as synonymous with liberalism.

Mustafa Akyol

I don?t think that India is much celebrated for its democracy. Democracy has been a very neglected commodity at home and abroad.

Amartya Sen

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage . . . . Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Part of what you need to understand is that we're forced to look back. You had the importation of third world or developing world conditions into the United States because of a bipartisan elite consensus for neo-liberalism. In other words, you had both political parties, the smarty-pants in both political parties said, hey, let's do these crazy trade deals.

Van Jones

Negroes are in no mood to shoulder guns for democracy abroad while they are denied democracy here at home.

A. Philip Randolph

Except two or three parties, most parties are dependent on one family. I believe that only parties where internal democracy is alive can achieve the ideals of democracy.

Amit Shah

We preach the virtues of democracy abroad. We must practice its duties here at home. Voting is the first duty of democracy.

Lyndon B. Johnson

We have to accept that capitalism is coming to an end. We can't provide paid employment for people, all the industries with technology are counter-intuitive to profit, and we have to have a transition to the conceptualist society. The only way to do it fairly is as a social democracy, a radical social democracy, which isn't compromised by neo-liberalism and isn't compromised by the rich, and isn't compromised by hegemonic, authoritarian interests: to have that balance between the government, the private sector, and then the individual citizens again.

Irvine Welsh

I just immediately connect everything to the wars I have been covering overseas, and that's not the case back home. I wrongly assumed all Americans at home were as consumed with our troops in Afghanistan as I was abroad.

Lynsey Addario

The BJP has decided that politics is for values and ideals, and for this, an age limit has been decided. I think that for democracy and for political parties, this is a good indicator. It will be good if all the political parties adhere to this, thereby strengthening India's democracy.

Yogi Adityanath

In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.'

Steven Pinker

I'm a great aficionado of history. I was deeply affected by seeing the disintegration of any chance of democracy coping with fascism in the Weimar republic, where woolly-minded, well-meaning liberalism actually allowed the forces of darkness to use democracy, to exploit democracy, to overturn democracy.

David Blunkett

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

Theodor Adorno

I think with the advent of Reagan, and subsequently, both parties, there's been a strong move towards the advantage given to the richer people, in taxation and grants and supplements and things of that kind. Primarily exacerbated more recently by the Supreme Court's stupid ruling on Citizens United, and now there's a massive flood of money into the political system that I think has subverted the essence of a moral and ethical standard that used to permeate American democracy. Now it's not an admirable process. I think we've gone backwards.

Jimmy Carter

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.