Modern world Quote by Pankaj Mishra

““Secularized young men eagerly entering the modern world with their shorn beards found it in practice frustratingly obdurate and alienating: ‘the kingdom of bribes’, as the critic (and close friend of Herzen) Vissarion Belinsky denounced it in 1841, ‘religious indifference, licentiousness, absence of any spiritual interests, triumph of shameless impudent stupidity, mediocrity, ineptitude, where everything human, intelligent, noble, talented is condemned to suffer oppression, torment, censorship’.””

Pankaj Mishra

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

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“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…

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

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

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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…

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

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