Wisdom Quotes

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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.
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Pankaj Mishra

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As an Indian, you feel easily connected with certain histories in places like Indonesia, where one sees, because of the presence of the Hindu-Buddhist past, Hindus still living there or Muslims performing rituals that are instantly familiar.
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Pankaj Mishra

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

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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.
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Pankaj Mishra

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'Islamism' itself is such a broad and nearly meaningless word as used by the mainstream Western press, including everything from Turkey's AKP party to al Qaeda.
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Pankaj Mishra

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If you think of India in the 1980s, there weren't many writers in English around. The ones that were there, Amitav Ghosh or Vikram Seth, were living abroad or publishing from abroad.
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Pankaj Mishra

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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.
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Pankaj Mishra

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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.
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Pankaj Mishra

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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.
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Pankaj Mishra

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

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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.
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Pankaj Mishra

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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.
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Pankaj Mishra

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Gandhi's ideas were rooted in a wide experience of a freshly globalized world.
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Pankaj Mishra

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To Westerners, the students at Tiananmen may have given an impression of a solid and energetic consensus against dictatorship and for democracy, but they were an egotistical and fractious lot, riven by disagreements over tactics and money.
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Pankaj Mishra

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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.
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Pankaj Mishra

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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.
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Pankaj Mishra

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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.
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Pankaj Mishra

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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.
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Pankaj Mishra

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

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In the 1950s and 60s, geopolitical intrigues did not much engage masses in Asia and Africa; it was something for elites to sort out.
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Pankaj Mishra

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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.
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Pankaj Mishra

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Local markets for literary fiction remain underdeveloped; the metropolis often holds out the only real possibility of a professional writing career.
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Pankaj Mishra

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Many writers from the suburbs of history, such as Ireland and Argentina, produced more original work than their counterparts in the United States; they still seem to.
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Pankaj Mishra

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In a democratic age, you can't buck demography - except through civil war.
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Pankaj Mishra

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After the oil crisis of 1973, many European countries tightened restrictions on immigrants. By then, millions of Muslims had decided to settle in Europe, preferring the social segregation and racial discrimination they found in the West to political and economic turmoil at home.
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Pankaj Mishra

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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.
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Pankaj Mishra

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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.
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Pankaj Mishra

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In December 2004, I travelled on the road from Uzbekistan across the Oxus River on which the first Soviet convoys had rolled into Afghanistan 25 years before.
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Pankaj Mishra

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

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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.
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Pankaj Mishra

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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.
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Pankaj Mishra

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While there's life, there's fear.

Quote by - Mason Cooley

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Romance is tempestuous. Love is calm.
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Mason Cooley

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“the truth is never horrible, only interesting.”

Quote by - Agatha Christie

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“An appreciative listener is always stimulating.”

Quote by - Agatha Christie

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“Love is omni-inclusive, progressively exquisite, understanding and compassionately attuned to other than self.”

Quote by - Buckminster Fuller

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“For a society is always most cruel to those who disclose and reveal its secrets, when through dishonesty society itself has outraged Nature.”
Quote by -

Stefan Zweig

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Reading is becoming a kind of specialist activity, and that strikes terror into the heart of people who love reading.

Quote by - Ruth Rendell

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I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I'm still fanatical, but now I'm a little less fanatical.
Quote by -

Bill Gates

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Trying to tear down the past prohibits you from building up your future.

Quote by - Lil Wayne

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We're here to live. We're here to do, we're here to be.

Quote by - Lil Wayne

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A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied
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Larry David

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Money can run out, but talent is forever.
Quote by -

Lady Gaga

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"The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow."

Quote by - Altering Kurt

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"You will be what you will to be."

Quote by - James Allen

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"Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well."

Quote by - Jack London

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"Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind. Now that we know this, throw the raft away."
Quote by -

Jack Kerouac

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"Evil is whatever distracts."

Quote by - Franz Kafka

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