You have to be able to decide, 'Well no, I'm not going to be violent, I'm going to suppress that impulse; I'm not going to be greedy.' Unless you're able to do that you're stuck with adversarial politics that leads… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
So much of democracy is built on antagonism. It institutionalizes a certain kind of antagonism. This is not to say that we shouldn't have any democracy, but the fact is that democracy has hardened political identities and made them more… — 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
