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
When I moved to London in the 1990s, it had changed a great deal. Racism had become deeply uncool. But there has… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I still prefer going to the classical writers, the modernists and the nineteenth century writers. Much of what has been done since… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
The American writer is a very pampered figure - by foundations, by fellowships, by publishing advances. Even though I am not American,… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
A sustained engagement with the world, a sense of how it was and how it ought to be, and what has been… — 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
