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
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 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 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
It is this capacity for relentless self-criticism that should be - everywhere - the true measure of intellectual freedom and cosmopolitanism, not… — 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
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 Copy Share Image
The people who encouraged me weren't necessarily writers or readers themselves. They were people who were just pleased to see me devote… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
In India, love often follows marriage. I know many people who are still very deeply in love with their wives, who they… — 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
Gandhi saw how people have to re-think their own individuality before engaging in political activity. Otherwise they're just playing the game that… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Modernity has created more problems than it is capable of solving. Millions of people are now condemned to wait endlessly for their… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
The ’60s was the last time when large groups of people in the West searched for alternative modes of being. In a… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
We have so few unaffiliated public intellectuals now - people who are not beholden to a think tank, corporate-owned media, or academic… — 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
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
Once you empower people and say,' Here you are, now you get to dream the great dream of becoming a full citizen… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Most people turn things like elections into a fetish and think it's the only way to go: if we just keep giving… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
People who write about issues like poverty or terrorism are a part of the elite, and the distance between the elite and… — 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
In the end, of course, all novelists will be judged by their novels, but let's not forget that we will also need… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
The internet has spawned people for whom knowingness is more important than knowledge. It equips you with the illusion of offering knowledge… — 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
