The German Romantics of the late eighteenth and early…

“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

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

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

Buddhism resonated very powerfully with a lot of my preoccupations.

— Pankaj Mishra

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

Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee great literature.

— Pankaj Mishra

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

— 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 reformism, became…

— Pankaj Mishra

“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

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

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

“Marx reproduced medieval and Reformation millenarian expectations in his utopia of a classless, stateless society.”

— Pankaj Mishra

“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

Writers in the nineteenth century - people like George Eliot and Flaubert - were accustomed to addressing particular communities with which they shared not…

— Pankaj Mishra

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

— Pankaj Mishra