There was great political uncertainty in South Asia at the time of the Buddha. The older small tribal societies were cracking up… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I think what's important and extraordinarily practical about Buddhism, is that it offers very concrete methods for people to work with. — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The Buddha would not have liked people to call themselves Buddhist. To him that would have been a fundamental error because there… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“Imperialism has not allowed us to achieve historical normality,’ Octavio Paz lamented in The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). Paz was surveying the… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“The recent explosions, from India to the United States, of ressentiment against writers and journalists as well as politicians, technocrats, businessmen and… — 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
Buddhism doesn't really have much time for political mass-movements. We are so trained to think of politics in terms of acting collectively,… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
You need to work yourself up into some kind of a state every morning and believe that you are doing something terribly… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Buddhism has always been a religion for people who've worked their way through a cycle of materialism and still feel discontented 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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“As Keynes wrote, with devastating understatement, ‘The age of economic internationalism was not particularly successful in avoiding war.” — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“Marx reproduced medieval and Reformation millenarian expectations in his utopia of a classless, stateless society.” — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
