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 don't feel any great need to subscribe to a certain notion of Buddhism that says "You have to do this" or… — 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
Whether you are in the West, the East, the North, or the South, we should all feel pressured to attempt more, find… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Buddhism has always been a religion for people who've worked their way through a cycle of materialism and still feel discontented and… — 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
Most people turn things like elections into a fetish and think it's the only way to go: if we just keep giving… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Most of what I read is for reviewing purposes or related to something I want to write about. It's slightly utilitarian. I… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
In the end, of course, all novelists will be judged by their novels, but let's not forget that we will also need… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I am a secularist in the Gandhian sense of the word, not the Nehruvian one. Nehru thought religion was an antique superstition… — 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
