Pankaj Mishra Quotes

I think the 19th century is an extraordinary period with a welling up of creativity and all kinds of experimentation and exploration going on at least until 1940.

For almost a century since 1918, the centralised nation-state has been the world's default political form. Its various experiments in industrialisation, urbanisation, mass literacy and consumerism have brought more people into public life.

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.

As the 19th century progressed, Europe's innovations, norms and categories came to achieve a truly universal hegemony.

The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ.

The Japanese keenly learned from Western civilisation in a bid to modernize and preserve the nation.

The history of Europe over the last several centuries provides clear evidence of the transformative power of commerce.

We Americans look at the last 300 years of history, and we basically see a world that's getting better and better. The rule of freedom expands. The economy develops. We have risen to become the world's greatest power.

The Industrial Revolution caused a centuries-long shift in power to the West; globalization is now shifting the balance again.

The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished, derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the nineteenth century.

Over the past thirty years Europe’s influence has transformed Cairo. Now…we are civilized.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draw all, even the most barbarian of nations into civilization.

The War of 1812 has given new direction to wealth and industry in the United States, and manufacturers grew up as if by magic.

The Russian Communists faced a problem older than themselves, a problem that had pervaded their country throughout much of the nineteenth century: modernization. The consciousness of Russia's backwardness obsessed and united the elites.

The farmers of our country live better than did the kings and princes two hundred years ago … Liberty and labor have given us all.

The development of science has produced an industrial revolution which has brought different peoples in such close contact with one another through colonization and commerce that no matter how some nations may still look down upon others, no country can harbor the illusion that its career is decided wholly within itself.

The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us.

So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God.

Civic rationality and modern capitalism triumphed in the medieval northern European cities – but not in Chinese, Indian or Muslim cities

The Middle East was once an economically advanced region of the world, as measured by standard of living, technology, agricultural productivity, literacy or institutiontopmeal creativity. Only China might have been even more developed. Subsequently, however, the Middle East failed to match the institutional transformation through which western Europe vastly increased its capacity to pool resources, coordinate productive activities and conduct exchanges.

The modernizing elite in the technologically and economically poor nations responded to colonialism by seizing the power of the state and using it to change their societies, hoping to achieve justice at home and economic and cultural parity abroad. The politics of changing traditional social structures and processes by using state power did not always result in social progress and economic development, but it did lead to state supremacy and autocracy. In the more extreme cases autocratic regimes were transformed to either forward-looking or reactionary totalitarianism-of socialist-Marxist, fascist, or religious-fundamentalist types. These systems clearly failed or are failing. But at the time they were adopted, to many they represented hope and a promise of economic change, distributive justice, and a better future.

Edinburgh, Scotland went from a narrow, theocratic, awful society to the intellectuality and free thinking Great Enlightenment in only 100 years.

We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.

My final aim is to bring Iran, within twenty years, to the same level of civilization and progress as will be enjoyed by the most highly developed countries. During the last ten years the degree of our backwardness has been halved, but it is this remaining backwardness which will be the most difficult to combat.

The greatness of the Erie Canal is the American equal only of its equality and liberty.