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" Tenured professors are more prone than the rest of us to think that the university is the universe. "
Pankaj Mishra
University
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" 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
" Devout Anatolian masses rising from poverty have transformed Turkey politically and economically. "
Pankaj Mishra
Poverty
Masses
Rising
" Gandhi's ideas were rooted in a wide experience of a freshly globalized world. "
Pankaj Mishra
Wide
Ideas
World
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" I grew up in small towns in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra - places like Akola, Betul, Wardha, Jhansi; I thought the rise of provincial India would be an interesting subject to tackle. "
Pankaj Mishra
Rise
Thought
India
" As in the early 20th century, the elemental forces of globalisation have unravelled broad solidarities and loyalties. "
Pankaj Mishra
Century
Early
Forces
" 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
Empires
Free
Trade
" 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
Free
Ignore
Moral
" No Muslim country has ever done as much as Turkey to make itself over in the image of a European nation-state; the country's westernised elite brutally imposed secularism, among other things, on its devout population of peasants. "
Pankaj Mishra
Country
Much
Image
" 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
Go
Before
" 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
Beginning
Man
Small
" An enlarged global public society, with its many dissenting and corrective voices, can quickly call the bluff of lavishly credentialled and smug intellectual elites. "
Pankaj Mishra
Intellectual
Society
Global
" 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
" As the years passed in my village, I witnessed poorly educated young men leaving to seek the greater comforts and liberations of big cities. I would see them on my visits to Delhi. "
Pankaj Mishra
Educated
Young
Leaving
" 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
" 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
Progress
View
Knowledge
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
People
Political
World
" The White House tapes, the recordings that Nixon made of his conversations in office, have long been recognized as a marvel of verbal incontinence. "
Pankaj Mishra
House
White House
White
" Like the Britain of Beaverbrook and Kipling, Japan in the early twentieth century was a jingoistic nation, subduing weaker countries with the help of populist politicians and sensationalist journalism. "
Pankaj Mishra
Early
Journalism
Help
" 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
Like
Look
" In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English. "
Pankaj Mishra
Birthday
Before
Essay
" Enlightenment values of individual freedom are manifested best in individual acts of criticism and defiance. "
Pankaj Mishra
Acts
Best
Criticism
" So much of western self-perception and intellectual worldview has been shaped by the moral rhetoric of the Cold War, the discourse in which communism featured as a clear enemy, determined to rule the world. "
Pankaj Mishra
Communism
Enemy
Moral
" 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
" 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
More
May
" 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 onslaught of new and complex information, the academic and thinktank cults of expertise, not to mention the impossibility of bohemia in the age of high rents, have conspired to assassinate the public intellectual. "
Pankaj Mishra
Age
Information
Intellectual