Pankaj Mishra

Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee great literature.

— Pankaj Mishra

Most suffering is human-made and avoidable. It's mostly in your head.

— Pankaj Mishra

Buddhism resonated very powerfully with a lot of my preoccupations.

— Pankaj Mishra

In the modern world, nationalism remains a very important force. We delude ourselves into thinking that globalization has made all of that…

— Pankaj Mishra

If you belong to a small country that is geopolitically not that important, or strategically not that important, you have no place…

— Pankaj Mishra

I myself, at one time, wanted to be like the explorers of the Himalayas that I used to read about; people intoxicated…

— Pankaj Mishra

I think what's important and extraordinarily practical about Buddhism, is that it offers very concrete methods for people to work with.

— Pankaj Mishra

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

We are always boosting or trying to prop up the ego by fulfilling some desire or other, and always craving affirmation from…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Marx reproduced medieval and Reformation millenarian expectations in his utopia of a classless, stateless society.”

— Pankaj Mishra

“Herzl wrote The Jewish State, his path-breaking manifesto of Zionism, in 1895 under the influence of Wagner, one of the nineteenth century’s…

— Pankaj Mishra

So much of writing is fed by vanity and the feeling that what you are doing is the most important thing in…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Bloom wrote, ‘there is nowhere else to seek it. I would suggest that fascism has a future, if not the future.’ The…

— Pankaj Mishra

“The implications are sobering: the non-West not only finds itself replicating the West’s trauma on an infinitely larger scale. While helping inflict…

— Pankaj Mishra

“In other words, in 1919 relatively few people could become disenchanted with liberal modernity because only a tiny minority had enjoyed the…

— Pankaj Mishra

I don't think of myself as particularly earnest. I have long bouts of cynicism and skepticism. So much of my early life…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Rousseau alienated his aristocratic patrons; he quarrelled with most of his friends and well-wishers, including Hume and Diderot, many of whom also…

— Pankaj Mishra

“The German Romantics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries rejected the Atlantic West’s new materialist, individualistic and imperialistic civilization in…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Writing during the heyday of Modernization Theory, the French critic Raymond Aron, though resolutely anti-communist, termed American-style individualism the product of a…

— Pankaj Mishra

Writers in the nineteenth century - people like George Eliot and Flaubert - were accustomed to addressing particular communities with which they…

— Pankaj Mishra

“In fact, the words perfectibilité and civilisation made their first appearance in any European language in the 1750s. The adjective ‘social’ acquired…

— Pankaj Mishra

There are some serious limitations in Mo Yan's situation as a writer in China today - just as there are for Jia…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Thus, the intellectual cottage industry about Islam and Islamism that is sent into overdrive after every terrorist attack rarely lingers on the…

— Pankaj Mishra

Incidentally, I am intrigued by how many European and Latin American writers expressed their political views in the columns they routinely wrote…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Secularized young men eagerly entering the modern world with their shorn beards found it in practice frustratingly obdurate and alienating: ‘the kingdom…

— Pankaj Mishra

I think a more complex idea of fiction - and the human self's relationship with the world - emerges when we abandon…

— Pankaj Mishra

I guess I am nostalgic for a time - the nineteenth century and early twentieth - when writers were, to use Stefan…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Today, the belief in progress, necessary for life in a Godless universe, can no longer be sustained, except, perhaps, in the Silicon…

— Pankaj Mishra

“As Keynes wrote, with devastating understatement, ‘The age of economic internationalism was not particularly successful in avoiding war.”

— Pankaj Mishra

As a novelist, your impulse is toward multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple perceptions, multiple nuances, the ambiguity in human communication. Fiction really is…

— Pankaj Mishra

I suppose I've become less judgmental about individuals leading lives according to false ideas and false consciousness, because sometimes entire societies are…

— Pankaj Mishra

“History, largely experienced previously as a series of natural disasters, could now be seen as a movement in which everyone could potentially…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Nationalism has again become a seductive but treacherous antidote to an experience of disorder and meaninglessness: the unexpectedly rowdy anticlimax, in a…

— Pankaj Mishra

The Buddha would not have liked people to call themselves Buddhist. To him that would have been a fundamental error because there…

— Pankaj Mishra

There was great political uncertainty in South Asia at the time of the Buddha. The older small tribal societies were cracking up…

— Pankaj Mishra

Our tolerance of the intolerable found a low threshold as early as the late 1950s with the grotesque excesses of McCarthyism, which…

— Pankaj Mishra

I feel the responsibility of the novelist is to create a very complex world populated by very complex individuals and to deepen…

— Pankaj Mishra

Dickens didn't have access to any other epistemologies other than those prevailing in Britain. But a novelist today cannot plausibly claim ignorance…

— Pankaj Mishra

It is this capacity for relentless self-criticism that should be - everywhere - the true measure of intellectual freedom and cosmopolitanism, not…

— Pankaj Mishra

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