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Pankaj Mishra Quotes

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

Pankaj Mishra

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

Tags: first, essay, english

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

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.

Tags: india, empire, british

About Author
Pankaj Mishra (born 9 February 1969) is an Indian essayist, novelist, and socialist. His non-fiction works include Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond, along with From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, and A Great Clamour: Encounters with China and Its Neighbours, and he has published two novels. He is a Bloomberg opinion columnist, and prolific contributor to other periodicals such as The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. His writings have led to a number of controversies, including disputes with Salil Tripathi, Niall Ferguson and Jordan Peterson. He was awarded the Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction in 2014.

Unlike his compatriots - many of whom were still, in their mid-twenties, adolescent posturers, doomed to futility - he had an engaging earnestness about him. Unlike them, he realized his incompletenes...

Pankaj Mishra

Unlike his compatriots - many of whom were still, in their mid-twenties, adolescent posturers, doomed to futility - he had an engaging earnestness about him. Unlike them, he realized his incompletenes...

Tags: reading, self improvement, self transformation

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

Pankaj Mishra

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

Tags: communist, china, image

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 f...

Pankaj Mishra

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 f...

Tags: world, people, bear

In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Japan had put forward a proposal to guarantee racial equality at the League of Nations, but Woodrow Wilson overturned it in the face of majority support.

Pankaj Mishra

In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Japan had put forward a proposal to guarantee racial equality at the League of Nations, but Woodrow Wilson overturned it in the face of majority support.

Tags: peace, support, face

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 inconceivabl...

Pankaj Mishra

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 inconceivabl...

Tags: freedom, space, political

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

Pankaj Mishra

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

Tags: writing, kind, going

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.

Pankaj Mishra

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.

Tags: democracy, government, world

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

Pankaj Mishra

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

Tags: best, values, enlightenment

Bernard Lewis was most likely unaware of the Turkish leader’s fan base among Nazis and Fascists when he hailed Atatürk for taking, with his attempted obliteration of Islam, ‘the first decisive steps i...

Pankaj Mishra

Bernard Lewis was most likely unaware of the Turkish leader’s fan base among Nazis and Fascists when he hailed Atatürk for taking, with his attempted obliteration of Islam, ‘the first decisive steps i...

Many of them also became members, like Naipaul and Rushdie, of what the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah calls a ‘comprador intelligentsia’: ‘a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group o...

Pankaj Mishra

Many of them also became members, like Naipaul and Rushdie, of what the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah calls a ‘comprador intelligentsia’: ‘a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group o...

Responding to Fukuyama’s thesis in 1989, Allan Bloom was full of foreboding about the gathering revolts against a world that ‘has been made safe for reason as understood by the market’, and ‘a global...

Pankaj Mishra

Responding to Fukuyama’s thesis in 1989, Allan Bloom was full of foreboding about the gathering revolts against a world that ‘has been made safe for reason as understood by the market’, and ‘a global...