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
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
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
“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 Copy Share Image
“Bloom wrote, ‘there is nowhere else to seek it. I would suggest that fascism has a future, if not the future.’ 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
Most books germinate within you for a long time before they are ready to come out. I wrote several drafts of the… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“In his What is to be Done? (1863), probably the worst Russian novel of the nineteenth century (and also the most influential),… — 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
You need to work yourself up into some kind of a state every morning and believe that you are doing something terribly… — 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
“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
