Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Basically, I think of fiction and non-fiction as different ways of engaging with the world. You reach a point where you feel you have said all you possibly can, in reportage or a review essay or a reflection on history, which 'From the Ruins of Empire' was. "

Related Quotes:

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

Pankaj Mishra

Hollywood

Late

Strange

" 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

Dreamers

Student

" Britain's unique success as an industrialised nation-state prompted strong imitative endeavours not only across Europe, but also in Asia. Now many people, who were once humiliated into a sense of nationality by British rule, loom larger than their former masters. "

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

" Decolonisation seems to have dented little the sense of superiority that since 1945 has made American leaders in particular consistently underestimate the intensity of nationalist feeling in Asia and Africa. "

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

" 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. "

Pankaj Mishra

Cynical

Divide

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

" 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

Speak

May

" For almost a century since 1918, the centralised nation-state has been the world's default political form. Its various experiments in industrialisation, urbanisation, mass literacy and consumerism have brought more people into public life. "

" 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. "

" Life in a Chinese village is much more organised because the Chinese Communist Party has a presence even in the remotest Chinese village - a presence of the kind that no governmental or non-governmental organisation has in Indian villages. "

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

" 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. "

Pankaj Mishra

Publish

Before

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Pankaj Mishra

Out

English

" 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. "

" 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

China

Look

" The Sino-Indian War in 1962 has fundamentally shaped and distorted Indian attitudes towards China. It also obscured a great deal of what has happened in China since 1962. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" It should be no surprise that religion in the non-western world has failed to disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism, or that liberal democracy finds its most dedicated saboteurs among the new middle classes. "

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

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