Indian - Novelist | 1969 -
Happily, financial capitalism and free trade have not done away with national languages and literatures, as Marx rather too blithely hoped.
Pankaj Mishra
FreeCapitalismFinancialDoneTrade
Tenured professors are more prone than the rest of us to think that the university is the universe.
RestThinkUniverseMoreUniversity
I am often struck by the anxious inferiority many well-educated British people display towards the U.S., particularly Londoners dazzled by New York, when many postcolonials are accustomed to regarding Britain's old imperial cosmopolis as the true capital of the western world.
I AmNew YorkPeopleWorldNewTrue
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.
GreatAmericanLateWhiteLiving
The cultural decoding that many American writers require has become an even harder task in the age of globalisation. The experience they describe has grown more private; its essential background, the busy larger world, has receded.
AgeExperienceWorldBusyAmerican
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.
WisdomGovernmentDemocracyWorld
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.
IgnoranceDecisionsPoliticalAct
Economic disasters or foolish wars are hardly guaranteed to bring about large-scale individual self-examination or renew the appeal of truly participatory democracy.
DemocracyIndividualFoolishBring
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.
SpeakLanguageProveMoreSeemMay
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.
IslamWithinBiggerWestMayEven
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.
WarCommunismWorldColdMoral
Just as China achieved much more than India in the realm of public health and education under an austere Communist regime, so its economic growth under a capitalist-friendly government strikes a visitor from India as nothing less than spectacular.
EducationGrowthHealthGovernment
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Pankaj Mishra quotes