51 Pankaj Mishra Quotes for You to Enjoy

Pankaj Mishra

Indian Novelist

Born: 1969

China People Political Think War World

Related authors: Charles Dickens Ernest Hemingway Gustave Flaubert James Baldwin John Updike Leo Rosten Paulo Coelho Walter Scott

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

Political Revolution French French Revolution Greatest Intellectual Breakthrough Enlightenment

I think the presence of caste in India, how the villages are geographically structured on caste lines, is very different from China. The presence of an egalitarian culture is striking in a Chinese village. Pankaj Mishra

Culture Think Striking India Structured Caste How Lines Very Egalitarian Different China Chinese Village Villages Presence

The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later, the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan. Pankaj Mishra

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

Best Freedom Defiance Values Criticism Individual Individual Freedom Manifested Acts Enlightenment

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

Nationalism India Minorities Some Ethnic Many Rebelled Pakistan

Countries that managed to rebuild commanding state structures after popular nationalist revolutions - such as China, Vietnam, and Iran - look stable and cohesive when compared with a traditional monarchy such as Thailand or wholly artificial nation-states like Iraq and Syria. Pankaj Mishra

Rebuild State Syria Structures Countries Like Look Traditional Commanding Iran Iraq Thailand Artificial Revolutions Stable Nationalist After China Vietnam Popular Compared Wholly Monarchy Cohesive

As a young man in South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century, Gandhi developed satyagraha, a mode of political activism based upon moral persuasion, while mobilizing South Africa's small Indian minority against racial discrimination. Pankaj Mishra

Man Political Minority South Africa Beginning Young Moral Indian Small Developed South Discrimination Mode Africa While Against Young Man Century Racial Persuasion Gandhi Twentieth Twentieth Century Activism Based

National independence, and the preceding political struggles, helped create the space for literary creation in many post-colonial countries. Much of modern Indian or Chinese literature is inconceivable without the political movement for freedom from foreign rule. Pankaj Mishra

Freedom Political Space Independence National Creation Rule Indian Struggles Freedom From Countries Without Foreign Political Movement Modern Movement Literary Literature Chinese Create Much Helped Many Inconceivable

Ordinary Muslims in Europe, who suffer from the demoralisation caused by living as perennial objects of suspicion and contempt, are far from thinking of themselves as a politically powerful, or even cohesive, community, not to speak of conquerors of Europe. Pankaj Mishra

Many Indians and Israelis seem set to elect, with untroubled consciences, those who speak the language of torturers and terrorists. More disturbingly, these corrupted democracies may increasingly prove the norm rather than the exception. Pankaj Mishra

The Turkish, Arab and Chinese nationalists who built new nation-states out of the ruins of old empires scorned their old, decrepit rulers as much as they did the foreign imperialists who imposed free trade through gunboats. Pankaj Mishra

The idea that modernisation makes for enhanced national power and rapid progress and helps everyone achieve greater happiness has its origins in the astonishing political, economic and military successes of western Europe in the 19th century. Pankaj Mishra

Happiness Progress Political Achieve Power National Military Everyone Astonishing Rapid Economic Idea Greater Makes Western Western Europe Century Successes Europe Helps Enhanced Origins

Tanpinar presciently feared that to embrace the western conception of progress was to be mentally enslaved by a whole new epistemology, one that compartmentalised knowledge and concealed an instrumental view of human beings as no more than things to be manipulated. Pankaj Mishra

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

Achieve Innovations Categories Came Truly Norms Century Hegemony Europe Universal

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

World Attacks Consumption Terrorist Celebrations Capital Disrupted

Since the end of the Cold War, metropolitan elites everywhere have identified progress and modernity with the cornucopia of global capitalism, the consolidation of liberal democratic regimes and the secular ethic of consumerism. Pankaj Mishra

A free and rooted society ought to consist of a web of moral obligations. We have the right to ignore them, but we ought to be actually obliged not to let other people starve or to let them lapse into destitution. Pankaj Mishra

Obligations People Free Society Other Starve Ought Consist Moral Web Obliged Them Rooted Ignore Lapse Actually Right

As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories. Pankaj Mishra

I think subsuming political and economic conflicts into some grand 'clash of civilisations' theory or 'the West versus the rest' binary is a particularly insidious form of ideological deception. Pankaj Mishra

Political Binary Rest Think Clash Insidious Some Economic Particularly Ideological West Versus Deception Form Conflicts Grand Theory

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