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" Gandhi's ideas were rooted in a wide experience of a freshly globalized world. "
Pankaj Mishra
Wide
Ideas
World
Related Quotes:
" As the spiritual leader of six million people, the Dalai Lama can be credited with a significant renunciation of the authority of tradition - of the conventional politics of national self-interest as well as of religion. "
Pankaj Mishra
Religion
Leader
Politics
" Indonesia's diversity is formidable: some thirteen and a half thousand islands, two hundred and fifty million people, around three hundred and sixty ethnic groups, and more than seven hundred languages. "
Pankaj Mishra
Diversity
Two
Three
" 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
Rest
Deception
West
" Indonesia is hardly immune to catastrophic breakdowns, as the anti-Communist pogrom showed. But, like India, it has been relatively fortunate in evolving a mode of politics that can include many discontinuities - of class, region, ethnicity, and religion. "
Pankaj Mishra
Like
Class
Politics
" In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English. "
Pankaj Mishra
Birthday
Before
Essay
" The Arab Spring showed that people are not going to wait for an American president to make good on his big talk about democracy and human rights; they are going to fight for those rights themselves and overthrow pro-American dictators who stand in their way. "
Pankaj Mishra
American
People
Good
" Enlightenment values of individual freedom are manifested best in individual acts of criticism and defiance. "
Pankaj Mishra
Acts
Best
Criticism
" In 1853, American warships bullied Japan out of centuries of virtual isolation and into the modern world. The threat of force compelled Japan, like India and China before it, to accept trade agreements that were economically ruinous and eroded national sovereignty. "
Pankaj Mishra
Isolation
World
Like
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Underestimate
Africa
American
" Shallowness and ignorance have been our lot in the mass consumer societies we inhabit, where we were too distracted to act politically, apart from periodically deputing political elites to take life-and-death decisions on our behalf. "
Pankaj Mishra
Decisions
Act
Political
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Fear
Think
Political
" 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
End
War
Progress
" 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
Forward
Peace
Support
" As in the early 20th century, the elemental forces of globalisation have unravelled broad solidarities and loyalties. "
Pankaj Mishra
Century
Early
Forces
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Think
You
World
" Obama was expected to restore an ethical sheen to post-9/11 foreign policy, but he has intensified drone warfare in Yemen and Pakistan, pursued whistle-blowers, and failed to close down Guantanamo. "
Pankaj Mishra
Down
Ethical
Foreign Policy
" The advocates of retaliatory wars will continue to assume a much simpler reality with their hoary oppositions: Religious and secular, backward and enlightened, free and unfree. But if we are to admit how deeply and irrevocably interconnected our world is, then we must find new ways to break the cycle of counter-productive violence. "
Pankaj Mishra
World
Find
Free
" Though there are laws against blasphemy and insult to religion in many European countries, France has institutionalised its anti-clerical past by proscribing religion from public life. "
Pankaj Mishra
Religion
Insult
Past
" 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
Political
Power
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Now
People
Strong
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Said
Claim
Audience
" The clash of civilizations or the clash between Islam and the West may be cliches. But there is an even bigger cliche around: that this clash actually goes on within Islam, between reformists and fanatics. "
Pankaj Mishra
West
Within
Bigger
" 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
More
Divide
" Though blessed with many able administrators, the British found India just too large and diverse to handle. Many of their decisions stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions, imposing sharp new religious-political identities on Indians. "
Pankaj Mishra
Decisions
Blessed
New
" 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
Think
India
Culture
" Policymakers can draw much from 'The Need for Roots': such clear prescriptions as that employers ought to provide an adequate vocational training for their employees, education should be compulsory and publicly funded, and include technical as well as elementary education. "
Pankaj Mishra
Employees
Roots
Training
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Great
Indian
Shaped
" Tenured professors are more prone than the rest of us to think that the university is the universe. "
Pankaj Mishra
University
More
Rest
" Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first. "
Pankaj Mishra
American
Late
White
" Force-backed humanitarianism, which relies on rational influence over events in other countries, may have been a more feasible project in the bipolar era of the Cold War, with its relatively defined and stable web of alliances and proxies. "
Pankaj Mishra
Project
War
Influence