Pankaj Mishra

Once you empower people and say,' Here you are, now you get to dream the great dream of becoming a full citizen…

— Pankaj Mishra

You need to work yourself up into some kind of a state every morning and believe that you are doing something terribly…

— Pankaj Mishra

We, especially those of us in depoliticized and pacified societies, need to cast a colder eye at our self-perceptions, now and in…

— Pankaj Mishra

We have so few unaffiliated public intellectuals now - people who are not beholden to a think tank, corporate-owned media, or academic…

— Pankaj Mishra

If you think that what you're doing is not all that important in the larger scheme of things and that you're just…

— Pankaj Mishra

“It has also become clearer how the schemes of human expansion and fulfilment offered by the left, right, or ‘centrist’ liberals and…

— Pankaj Mishra

What happens when we examine the claims made for Western liberalism as a universalizing ideology of tolerance, human dignity, equality, and compassion…

— Pankaj Mishra

Today, practically every country outside the West is undergoing an intellectual, political, and cultural churning, from China to Bolivia, Egypt to Indonesia,…

— Pankaj Mishra

I guess I am nostalgic for a time - the nineteenth century and early twentieth - when writers were, to use Stefan…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Al-e-Ahmad’s invocation of existentialist and absurdist themes in the context of Tehran’s slums underlined a shared predicament. Following Hedayat, he spoke of…

— Pankaj Mishra

“The eschatological impulse, a reflection (or distortion) of the Orthodox Church, was recognizably at work among Russian revolutionaries, notably Belinsky and Bakunin.…

— Pankaj Mishra

There are some serious limitations in Mo Yan's situation as a writer in China today - just as there are for Jia…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Thus, the intellectual cottage industry about Islam and Islamism that is sent into overdrive after every terrorist attack rarely lingers on the…

— Pankaj Mishra

Incidentally, I am intrigued by how many European and Latin American writers expressed their political views in the columns they routinely wrote…

— Pankaj Mishra

People who write about issues like poverty or terrorism are a part of the elite, and the distance between the elite and…

— Pankaj Mishra

We need a more complex understanding of writers working under authoritarian or repressive regimes. Something to replace this simpleminded, Cold War-ish equation…

— Pankaj Mishra

The internet has spawned people for whom knowingness is more important than knowledge. It equips you with the illusion of offering knowledge…

— Pankaj Mishra

The American writer is a very pampered figure - by foundations, by fellowships, by publishing advances. Even though I am not American,…

— Pankaj Mishra

I don't feel any great need to subscribe to a certain notion of Buddhism that says "You have to do this" or…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Postcolonial nation-building was an extraordinary project: hundreds of millions of people persuaded to renounce – and often scorn – a world of…

— Pankaj Mishra

I feel very privileged to get to read and write and not to have to do things that I don't like, and…

— Pankaj Mishra

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

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

It is this capacity for relentless self-criticism that should be - everywhere - the true measure of intellectual freedom and cosmopolitanism, not…

— Pankaj Mishra

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

“Since Voltaire and many other philosophes had become ardent champions of the partitioning overlords, Catherine and Frederick, Rousseau chose to become an…

— Pankaj Mishra

I meditate at airports because those are the places where I’m extremely tense, and I often meditate while I’m walking down the…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Voltaire was soon turned, with Catherine’s encouragement, into a patron saint for the secular Russian aristocracy. Voltairianism, vaguely signifying rationalism, scepticism and…

— Pankaj Mishra

I think that Indian writing in English is a really peculiar beast. I can't think of any literature - perhaps Russian literature…

— Pankaj Mishra

“For Rousseau, ‘the word finance is a slave’s word’ and freedom turns into a commodity, degrading buyer and seller alike, wherever commerce…

— Pankaj Mishra

The act of writing should not be accompanied by the sense of an audience, someone peering over your shoulder, but in nonfiction…

— Pankaj Mishra

I think the reporter or journalist is well served by having a responsibility to the powerless, to use a much-abused cliché. The…

— Pankaj Mishra

When I moved to London in the 1990s, it had changed a great deal. Racism had become deeply uncool. But there has…

— Pankaj Mishra

Our tolerance of the intolerable found a low threshold as early as the late 1950s with the grotesque excesses of McCarthyism, which…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Quoting the Slavophile Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn (‘To destroy a people, you must sever their roots’), Awlaki claimed that Muslims ‘are suffering…

— Pankaj Mishra

I feel the responsibility of the novelist is to create a very complex world populated by very complex individuals and to deepen…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Imperialism has not allowed us to achieve historical normality,’ Octavio Paz lamented in The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). Paz was surveying the…

— Pankaj Mishra

“This is also why Anglo-American achievements cannot be seen in isolation from their ambiguous consequences and victims elsewhere; why many Anglo-American assumptions,…

— Pankaj Mishra

Dickens didn't have access to any other epistemologies other than those prevailing in Britain. But a novelist today cannot plausibly claim ignorance…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Writing during the heyday of Modernization Theory, the French critic Raymond Aron, though resolutely anti-communist, termed American-style individualism the product of a…

— Pankaj Mishra