The idea that human beings can make history, that is something quite unique to the modern West. — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
We need to infuse politics with ideas like compassion and empathy, and a sense that we live in an interdependent world. — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
There is this idea of history as something you make, as a meaningful narrative with a beginning and an end, the end… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
The whole idea of mindfulness is all about having a second-level monitoring of your thoughts and being able to recognize them as… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Christianity and Islam are concerned with the idea of justice, which can turn into political justice, social justice, economical justice, and so… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I suppose I've become less judgmental about individuals leading lives according to false ideas and false consciousness, because sometimes entire societies are… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I think excessive rationality can be very dangerous. Certainly the kind of rationality we've seen in the last hundred years, and still… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I think the Buddha presents an image of someone who believes in self-control. I think he's offering, perhaps, a critique of the… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
The whole Hollywood conception of Tibet as this peace-loving country denies the complex humanity of the Tibetan people. Their ideas exist in… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
The act of writing should not be accompanied by the sense of an audience, someone peering over your shoulder, but in nonfiction… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
In India, love often follows marriage. I know many people who are still very deeply in love with their wives, who they… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I think a more complex idea of fiction - and the human self's relationship with the world - emerges when we abandon… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
People who write about issues like poverty or terrorism are a part of the elite, and the distance between the elite and… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“Nationalism has again become a seductive but treacherous antidote to an experience of disorder and meaninglessness: the unexpectedly rowdy anticlimax, in a densely populated… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
I feel very privileged to get to read and write and not to have to do things that I don't like, and I don't… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
There was great political uncertainty in South Asia at the time of the Buddha. The older small tribal societies were cracking up and gave… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
Our tolerance of the intolerable found a low threshold as early as the late 1950s with the grotesque excesses of McCarthyism, which destroyed so… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
“As Keynes wrote, with devastating understatement, ‘The age of economic internationalism was not particularly successful in avoiding war.” — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
“Voltaire was soon turned, with Catherine’s encouragement, into a patron saint for the secular Russian aristocracy. Voltairianism, vaguely signifying rationalism, scepticism and reformism, became… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
“Today, the belief in progress, necessary for life in a Godless universe, can no longer be sustained, except, perhaps, in the Silicon Valley mansions… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
We are always boosting or trying to prop up the ego by fulfilling some desire or other, and always craving affirmation from the outside. — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
I don't think of myself as particularly earnest. I have long bouts of cynicism and skepticism. So much of my early life was full… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
“Marx reproduced medieval and Reformation millenarian expectations in his utopia of a classless, stateless society.” — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
“History, largely experienced previously as a series of natural disasters, could now be seen as a movement in which everyone could potentially enlist.” — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
Writers in the nineteenth century - people like George Eliot and Flaubert - were accustomed to addressing particular communities with which they shared not… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
