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 famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories. -Pankaj Mishra Famous
If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there's going to be some kind of friction. -Pankaj Mishra Wisdom
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 War
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 Wisdom
Enlightenment values of individual freedom are manifested best in individual acts of criticism and defiance. -Pankaj Mishra Freedom
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 inconceivable without the political movement for freedom from foreign rule. -Pankaj Mishra Independence
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 Politics
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 Equality
