Pankaj Mishra Quotes

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  • Essayist
  • born 1969
  • 182 quotes

Pankaj Mishra, an essayist (born 1969), is quoted 182 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are Elites, People, Ignorance and Buddhism.

Quotes with a ready-made image come first, then the rest in order of how often they are read and shared. Open any quote to copy it, share it, or turn it into a picture quote.

Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee great literature.

My dominant feeling every day is one of great ignorance.

Buddhism resonated very powerfully with a lot of my preoccupations.

Certainly, imperial power is never peaceably acquired or maintained.

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

In a democratic age, you can't buck demography - except through civil war.

In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English.

Gandhi's ideas were rooted in a wide experience of a freshly globalized world.

The idea that human beings can make history, that is something quite unique to the modern West.

If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there's going to be some kind of friction.

Devout Anatolian masses rising from poverty have transformed Turkey politically and economically.

Tenured professors are more prone than the rest of us to think that the university is the universe.

Many ethnic minorities chafed at the postcolonial nationalism of India and Pakistan, and some rebelled.

After India and China, Indonesia was the biggest new nation-state to emerge in the mid-twentieth century.

The longing for a very garish kind of success seems as widespread among writers as among investment bankers.

Enlightenment values of individual freedom are manifested best in individual acts of criticism and defiance.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 briefly disrupted celebrations of a world globalised by capital and consumption.

Most writers have very little that's important or valuable to offer; most of them are just repeating each other.

As in the early 20th century, the elemental forces of globalisation have unravelled broad solidarities and loyalties.

As the 19th century progressed, Europe's innovations, norms and categories came to achieve a truly universal hegemony.

We need to infuse politics with ideas like compassion and empathy, and a sense that we live in an interdependent world.

I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.

It's strange to recall that America animated none of my youthful daydreams. I did not see a Hollywood film until my late teens.

Governments everywhere that are unable to guarantee equitable growth and social welfare have suffered a fatal decay of legitimacy.

In the 1950s and 60s, geopolitical intrigues did not much engage masses in Asia and Africa; it was something for elites to sort out.

The Dalai Lama can claim the sanction of the Buddha, who is said to have altered his teachings in order to reach a diverse audience.

The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment's greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic.

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

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

The Korean War, which China entered on the side of North Korea, fixed Mao's image in the United States as another unappeasable Communist.

Happily, financial capitalism and free trade have not done away with national languages and literatures, as Marx rather too blithely hoped.

The asymmetries of power that have shaped relations between the West and the rest of the world also exist in the realm of literary criticism.

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

Gandhi, brought out of his semirural setting and given a Western-style education, initially attempted to become more English than the English.

In a typically contradictory move, globalisation, while promoting economic integration among elites, has exacerbated sectarianism everywhere else.

The White House tapes, the recordings that Nixon made of his conversations in office, have long been recognized as a marvel of verbal incontinence.

Local markets for literary fiction remain underdeveloped; the metropolis often holds out the only real possibility of a professional writing career.

I found it really disturbing to see a novelist writing a diatribe about Islam and Muslim radical extremists, blurring the distinction between the two.

I think there is no reason for us to bring to Islamism or political Islam the fear and ignorance of Western commentators and their hysterical vocabulary.

My life was made easy - I lived in a village, and by writing for some newspapers and magazines, had enough to live on. I was happy to be there and write.

To think that land reform is going to somehow automatically create an equitable system, I think that's just wrong. It's a very technical view of the world.

In December 2004, I travelled on the road from Uzbekistan across the Oxus River on which the first Soviet convoys had rolled into Afghanistan 25 years before.

'Islamism' itself is such a broad and nearly meaningless word as used by the mainstream Western press, including everything from Turkey's AKP party to al Qaeda.

Modernity has created more problems than it is capable of solving. Millions of people are now condemned to wait endlessly for their redemption through modernity.

Ineptitude and negligence directed British policies in India more than any cynical desire to divide and rule, but the British were not above exploiting rivalries.

Democracy, loudly upheld as a cure for much of the ailing world, has proved no guarantor of political wisdom, even if it remains the least bad form of government.

An enlarged global public society, with its many dissenting and corrective voices, can quickly call the bluff of lavishly credentialled and smug intellectual elites.

Economic disasters or foolish wars are hardly guaranteed to bring about large-scale individual self-examination or renew the appeal of truly participatory democracy.

Many writers from the suburbs of history, such as Ireland and Argentina, produced more original work than their counterparts in the United States; they still seem to.

Tiananmen Square in early 1989 attracted many dreamers like Ma Jian, who returned from Hong Kong to a one-room shack in Beijing in order to join the student protests.

Pankaj Mishra is quoted on

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