Quotes from Pankaj Mishra

The two pigeons killed had just given birth. And now the baby pigeon doesn't know who he is. He is going through an identity crisis.

Herzl wrote The Jewish State, his path-breaking manifesto of Zionism, in 1895 under the influence of Wagner, one of the nineteenth century's most notorious anti-Semites.

Responding to Fukuyama's thesis in 1989, Allan Bloom was full of foreboding about the gathering revolts against a world that 'has been made safe for reason as understood by the market', and 'a global common market the only goal of which is to minister to men's bodily needs and whims'.

I was to see Helen again, in another place and time. But now I was settling into my new self – the self that had travelled and imagined that it had learnt much. I didn't know then that I would use up many more such selves, that they would arise and disappear, making all experience hard to fix and difficult to learn from.

we all share the same fate: we carry within us more love, and above all more longing than today's society is able to satisfy. We have all ripened for something, and there is no one to harvest the fruit Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Karl Mannheim (1922)

It has also become clearer how the schemes of human expansion and fulfilment offered by the left, right, or 'centrist' liberals and technocrats rarely considered such constraining factors as finite geographical space, degradable natural resources and fragile ecosystems.