Pankaj Mishra Quotes

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.

As equality increases, so does the number of people struggling for predominance.

The organization and constant onward sweep of this movement exemplifies the resentment of the many toward the selfishness, greed and the neglect of the few.

Those who have had no share in the good fortunes of the mighty often have a share in their misfortunes.

You [a country] cannot be rich, successful and powerful and still be loved, particularly be those who have little success, wealth or power.

Some will always be above others. Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

Face it, the system is rigged, and it's rigged against us.

I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.

Inequality is a terrible waste of time, a waste of people's resources.

I am from the class that has, in a sense, benefited from the status quo, but everyone still gets victimized.

Inequality doesn't create unhappiness.

Why did the world ever become so unequal?

He that despises his neighbor's happiness because he wears a worsted cap or a leather apron, he that struts immeasurably above the lower size of the people, and pretends to adjust the rights of the men by the distinctions of fortune

What makes equality such a difficult business is that we only want it with our superiors.

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of the half of society over which the other half has power—from the exercises of the right of the strongest.

All men are created equal. Some, it appears, are created a little more equal than others.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return

You are exacerbating inequality rather than opening up opportunity.

Liberty is impossible if 36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.

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.

Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.

I both love inequality and am terrified of it.