Pankaj Mishra Quotes

Politics isn't about left versus right; it's about top versus bottom.

I am appalled by the notion of cultural wars.

Elites that have prospered from inclusive systems can be tempted to pull up the ladder they climbed to the top. Eventually, their societies become extractive and their economies languish…. it is the danger America faces today, as the 1 percent pulls away from everyone else and pursues an economic, political and social agenda that will increase that gap even further — ultimately destroying the open system that made America rich and allowed its 1 percent to thrive in the first place.

It has become impossible to deny or obscure the great chasm . . . between an elite that seizes modernity’s choicest fruits while disdaining older truths and uprooted masses, who, on finding themselves cheated of the same fruits, recoil into cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality.

Surrounded by the evidence of their success, the wealthy come to believe that they are fundamentally better than other Americans and that working people deserve their declining fortunes. They trumpet meritocracy while ensuring that their children enjoy crushing advantages from birth. They have unprecedented access to politicians and use it to push policies that swell their wealth while defunding institutions, such as public education, that sustain opportunities for less-fortunate Americans.

The rich do not want people who come from poor families to rise to the highest position in the country.

Inequality hardens society into a class system. Inequality divides us from one another... Inequality undermines democracy.

We live increasingly in a world of haves and have-nots, of gated communities next to ghettos, of extreme poverty and unbelievable riches. Some enjoy rights that are completely denied to others. Relative inequalities are exploding, and the world's poorest, despite all the advances of globalisation, may even be getting poorer.

I love Romney. It is not his fault that he is the son of a successful governor and makes $20 million a year.

When people get rich, they cut themselves off from the context that has earned them these riches - the context of the common men. They forget they are part of society.

It turns out that globalisation, while promising sameness through brand-name consumption, was fostering, through uneven economic growth, an intense feeling of difference.

I look at my people, and I look at those who control them - the political elite. And the sad thing is that the elites are just not interested in the welfare of the people.

If someone doesn't have a reason to not like you in America, they talk politics or religion. Then they get to hate you and we get to be enemies.

As in the early 20th century, the elemental forces of globalisation have unravelled broad solidarities and loyalties.

There are huge divorces and divides and chasms in black America between the have-gots and the have-nots, between the monied and the poor, between the educated and the non-educated. And there are huge and growing chasms daily. And I want to say that it's not simply about generation. It's about genre.

In this closely divided nation, it satisfies no practical purpose for the entertainment elite to be identified as so intensely political and utterly one-sided.

As globalization proceeds, tribalism increases.

Our greatest political disease -- the disease of thinking that the community is divided into the relatively rich and the relatively idle, and the laborious poor, and that every social and political controversy can be resolved into the question: What side are you on?

Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.

The House of Commons is full of fat and pompous plutocrats…Public schools are cradles of sickening snobbery.

But the most common and durable source of faction [political parties] has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.

America is like a melting pot. The people at the bottom get burned, and the scum floats to the top.

I think the ethnic difference in Iraq are there but they’re exaggerated.

We've reached a truly remarkable situation: a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligencia and the American electorate.

Of the 1 Percent. By the 1 Percent. For the 1 Percent.