“History, largely experienced previously as a series of natural disasters, could now be seen as a movement in which everyone could potentially… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Writers in the nineteenth century - people like George Eliot and Flaubert - were accustomed to addressing particular communities with which they… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I myself, at one time, wanted to be like the explorers of the Himalayas that I used to read about; people intoxicated… — 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 idea that human beings can make history, that is something quite unique to the modern West. — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
In America, you don't even have proper holidays. It's really one of the most prosperous slave societies in history. People work their… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Western conception of history has had great consequences over the last two hundred years. You see it in the invasion of Iraq.… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
There is this idea of history as something you make, as a meaningful narrative with a beginning and an end, the end… — 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
