So much of democracy is built on antagonism. It institutionalizes a certain kind of antagonism. This is not to say that we… — 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
I think our conception of literature should accommodate not only apolitical writers but also those whose political opinions we find unpalatable. Fiction… — 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
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
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
I think overtly political novels - those that never transcend or contest their author's conscious intentions and prejudices - are problematic. This… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Incidentally, I am intrigued by how many European and Latin American writers expressed their political views in the columns they routinely wrote… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Today, practically every country outside the West is undergoing an intellectual, political, and cultural churning, from China to Bolivia, Egypt to Indonesia,… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I guess I am nostalgic for a time - the nineteenth century and early twentieth - when writers were, to use Stefan… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
The recent past is full of diverse examples of writers - Mahfouz in Egypt, Pamuk in Turkey, and more interestingly, Pasternak in… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I think a more complex idea of fiction - and the human self's relationship with the world - emerges when we abandon… — 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… — 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
