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
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
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
I think the Buddha presents an image of someone who believes in self-control. I think he's offering, perhaps, a critique of the… — 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
Politics now is really only about self-interest, which means it has violence built into it because your self-interest is going to collide… — 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
What happens when we examine the claims made for Western liberalism as a universalizing ideology of tolerance, human dignity, equality, and compassion… — 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
“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
