Pankaj Mishra Quotes

Indeed, without emotion it seems unlikely we can even have morality.

People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.

You might want to think twice before you try to use a man's conscience against him. It may turn out he doesn't have one.

Good people can't out-think evil, cause evil thinks of things good folks can't think of.

Every child must master empathy-based ethics because the rules are changing; the less they apply the less learning them has positive impact

Beyond all our actions stands the larger shadow: How are we to choose between what we have been taught to think right and something else which manifestly succeeds?

I think she by this point has learned that Stark's not specifically responsible for her parents' death - that it's more something that has to do with him stopping... I think there's even a reference to him stopping his selling of weapons because they cause damage.

If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.

When humans act like animals, they become the most dangerous of animals to themselves and other humans, and this is because of another critical difference between humans and animals: Whereas animals are usually restrained by the limits of physical appetites, humans have mental appetites that can be far more gross and capacious than physical ones. Only humans squander and hoard, murder and pillage because of notions.

Of course, then you nearly crushed to death in front of my eyes. Later I thought of a perfectly good excuse for why I acted at that moment - because if I hadn't saved you, if your blood had been spilled there in front of me, I don't think I could have stopped myself from exposing us for what we are. But I only thought of that excuse later. At the time, all I could think was, 'Not her.

If the Americans attack Iran for the first time in 1,400 years, we may unite Sunnis and Shias against us. So I guess there is room for accomplishment everywhere.

If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.

I try not to be a prisoner to those kinds of thoughts or ideas of what I think my life should be or shouldn't be. That's why I've never had a five-year plan. I always knew that I wanted to have children. It wasn't kind of something that I discovered later. I also never felt the biological clock ticking because I think I always knew that I wanted to adopt.

I think marriage is dangerous. The idea of two people trying to possess each other is wrong. I don't think the flare of love lasts. Your mind rather than your emotions must answer for the success of matrimony. It must be friendship - a calm companionship which can last through the years.

I wish I could attribute the absence of any conventional Arab offensive in the last 20 years to a change of political climate or a willingness to abide by past accords. But unfortunately it is more likely that the Egyptians or Syrians concluded that the next time their tanks headed to Tel Aviv, there was nothing stopping the counterassaults from ending up in downtown Cairo or Damascus.

There are some people who think you have to hate them in order to shoot them. I don't think you do. It's just business.

Sin always seems 'good, and pleasant, and desirable,' at the time of commission.

You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action - that is, whether he is acting rightly or wrongly, like a good man or a bad one.

You got to wrestle with your conscience. You got to listen to people. It doesn't come so easy to me that this is right and that's wrong. It's never that simple.

… you were so worried about legal and illegal that you never stopped to think about whether it was right or wrong.

Most people don't have any association in their minds with what they do and with ethics. They think they somehow moved past the questions of morality or values or ethics, and that's something that I've never imagined to be true.

He’d only ever seen a gun once, a smaller one on the hip of that old deputy, a gun he’d always figured was more for show. He stuffed a fistful of deadly rounds in his pocket, thinking how each one could end an individual life, and understanding why such things were forbidden. Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.

I'm not for cutting off hands but I'm more for cutting off hands than I am for molesting children, if that's what it takes to stop it. I think that's fair.

Few knew in 2000 that Bush was going to end up with neoconservatives all over the place. And once 9/11 happened, I think it's fair to say that eight or nine neocons have had an enormous influence. The whole solution to every problem was to go after Iraq. This had been a neoconservative mantra for ten years. There was no secret about it.

There's a morality... I think there's a moral compass but whether that comes from religion or just from being a good person, and where one starts and the other begins... I'm a good person, I hope. But I'm never as good as I want to be, never as nice as I want to be, never as generous as I want to be.