Tariq Ali Quotes

Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat wearing Muslims.

If you asked me one day, I might say, "Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious." If you asked me another day, I'd just say flat out, "No."

If Jesus was a Jew, why did he have a Spanish name?

Most of the times that I think about my relationship to Judaism, I not only accuse myself of a shallowness, but I feel certain that there's a shallowness there. That's not a bad thing, really.

To call someone a Christian simply because he does some Christian-y things is giving false comfort to the unsaved.

I'm not going to just do a dumb zombie movie, although I love zombie movies.

There seems to be this tendency toward denigrating romantic comedies as of late because it becomes something sort of cheesy or whatever. Whereas this embraced what it was. As a fan of When Harry Met Sally or Annie Hall, as a demonstration of what romantic comedy could be and should be, I immediately phoned Nira back and said, "Yeah, I'd like to do this. It'll be fun."

I would tend to be drawn to independent cinema as a viewer, probably more than the big blockbuster.

I'm too young to play lawyers. But I've been really lucky because I never got labeled. I never did the John Hughes thing. I did adult movies. I'm not bragging or anything, but I think that I've chosen really good roles. I've played different people and showed that I have a little bit of range.

Infidel, n. In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.

I'm more Jewish than you think I am...I read the part of the Bible that said the Jews are God's chosen people.

Lord, I ascribe it to thy grace,And not to chance as others do,That I was born of Christian race,And not a Heathen, or a Jew.

But because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected president, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured - perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again not what kind of church I believe in - for that should be important only to me - but what kind of America I believe in.

I don't want to interpret the pope's words, especially as I am one of those horrible people who fell away from the Roman church after Martin Luther.

Friendship is the grand fundamental principle of Mormonism

No agreement between the British and Muslims can affect me. An agreement between Hindus and Muslims alone will affect me.

I always felt the Jewish part more. In fact, growing up I felt like a Jew among WASPs. My brother is more decidedly Waspy.

Black churches are very powerful forces in the African American community and always have been. Because religion has been that one place where you have an imagination that no one can control. And so, as long as you know that you are a human being and nobody can take that away from you, then God is that reality in your life that enables you to know that.

They call themselves Sephardic Jews, but that's not the important thing. The important thing is that some come from the Muslim world and some come from the Christian world. I would call them the Muslim Jews and the Christian Jews. It sounds absurd but you know what I mean.

Not until my fourteenth or fifteenth year did I begin to come across the word 'Jew,' with any frequency, partly in connection with political discussions.... For the Jew was still characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I maintained my rejection of religious attacks in this case as in others. Consequently, the tone, particularly that of the Viennese anti-Semitic press, seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation.

God took his chosen people and we are what's left. He looked at what's left and thought: I could kill you all, but let's see what happens. A little social experiment.

The idea of doing a period movie, some people say, "Isn't it odd that you're doing a period movie? That's a change of pace for you." And, I'm like, "Not really." When you're doing a science fiction movie, it's almost exactly the same.

I was in church a little bit as a very young kid, but, as they say in the South, 'it didnt take.' None of it took with me.

I gave up Christianity at about 14. Came back to it when getting on for 30. Not an emotional conversion; almost purely philosophical. I didn't want to. I'm not in the least a religious type. I want to be let alone, to feel I'm my own master; but since the facts seemed to be just the opposite, I had to give in.

I do feel there's certainly some films where you can feel that the directors don't care about the genre and they don't care about their characters.