Pankaj Mishra

Buddhism resonated very powerfully with a lot of my preoccupations.

— Pankaj Mishra

Most suffering is human-made and avoidable. It's mostly in your head.

— Pankaj Mishra

The idea that human beings can make history, that is something quite unique to the modern West.

— Pankaj Mishra

“There is, plainly, no deep logic to the unfolding of time.”

— Pankaj Mishra

Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee great literature.

— Pankaj Mishra

Politics now is really only about self-interest, which means it has violence built into it because your self-interest is going to collide…

— Pankaj Mishra

Most people turn things like elections into a fetish and think it's the only way to go: if we just keep giving…

— Pankaj Mishra

“What’s crucial about Rousseau, and many of his ideological successors, is that politics was always personal for him, unlike those whom Tocqueville…

— Pankaj Mishra

“History, largely experienced previously as a series of natural disasters, could now be seen as a movement in which everyone could potentially…

— Pankaj Mishra

The longing for a very garish kind of success seems as widespread among writers as among investment bankers.

— Pankaj Mishra

I wrote for many years without showing my writing to anyone, because I was constantly comparing it to what I was reading.…

— Pankaj Mishra

Western conception of history has had great consequences over the last two hundred years. You see it in the invasion of Iraq.…

— Pankaj Mishra

As a novelist, your impulse is toward multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple perceptions, multiple nuances, the ambiguity in human communication. Fiction really is…

— Pankaj Mishra

“And it sees ressentiment as the defining feature of a world where mimetic desire, or what Herzl called, approvingly, ‘Darwinian mimicry’, endlessly…

— Pankaj Mishra

You have to be able to decide, 'Well no, I'm not going to be violent, I'm going to suppress that impulse; I'm…

— Pankaj Mishra

There is this idea of history as something you make, as a meaningful narrative with a beginning and an end, the end…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Voltaire also keenly endorsed Catherine of Russia’s plan to ‘preach tolerance with bayonets at the end of their rifles’ in Poland. Exhorting…

— Pankaj Mishra

Nietzsche's vision of the superman is of someone who's able to control and tame his passions and turn them into something richer…

— Pankaj Mishra

The ’60s was the last time when large groups of people in the West searched for alternative modes of being. In a…

— Pankaj Mishra

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

I think our conception of literature should accommodate not only apolitical writers but also those whose political opinions we find unpalatable. Fiction…

— Pankaj Mishra

“the abandoning of ideological conviction – the modern surrogate for religious belief – or us-versus-them thinking won’t be easy. The experts on…

— Pankaj Mishra

“So they did in 1978, a year after Shariati died, under a leader he might have condemned as a very model of…

— Pankaj Mishra

Once you get past the grand normative claims made in the West for literature, especially the novel, in the post-Christian era -…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Shaped by political considerations, and then driven by geopolitical urgencies, Khomeinism was always a hybrid: the beneficiary of an ideological account of…

— Pankaj Mishra

I think overtly political novels - those that never transcend or contest their author's conscious intentions and prejudices - are problematic. This…

— Pankaj Mishra

“The United States, the Spanish-American writer George Santayana wrote, ‘has always thought itself in an eminent sense the land of freedom, even…

— Pankaj Mishra

“The hope that fuels the pursuit of endless economic growth – that billions of consumers in India & China will one day…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Closer attention to beliefs, mindsets and outlooks releases us from ideological and often moralizing categories; it reveals some shared aspirations, hopes, bitterness…

— Pankaj Mishra

“For, to be woken up at five in the morning by the devotional treacle of Anup Jalota, Hari Om Sharan and other…

— Pankaj Mishra

“There was actually little talk about Islam from the first generation of leaders in Muslim countries. They had distinguished themselves as anti-imperialist…

— Pankaj Mishra

Gandhi saw how people have to re-think their own individuality before engaging in political activity. Otherwise they're just playing the game that…

— Pankaj Mishra

Most writers have very little that's important or valuable to offer; most of them are just repeating each other.

— Pankaj Mishra

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

Most books germinate within you for a long time before they are ready to come out. I wrote several drafts of the…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Today, the belief in progress, necessary for life in a Godless universe, can no longer be sustained, except, perhaps, in the Silicon…

— Pankaj Mishra

There have been many instances of people combining the political life with the spiritual life, a life of constant self-examination. Gandhi was…

— Pankaj Mishra

“As Keynes wrote, with devastating understatement, ‘The age of economic internationalism was not particularly successful in avoiding war.”

— Pankaj Mishra

Whether you are in the West, the East, the North, or the South, we should all feel pressured to attempt more, find…

— Pankaj Mishra

“And gun-owning truck drivers in Louisiana have more in common with trishul-wielding Hindus in India, bearded Islamists in Pakistan, and nationalists and…

— Pankaj Mishra