Pankaj Mishra Quotes

Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize. This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West.

People tend to believe that to be modern you have to disengage from your heritage, but it's not true.

For members of a traditional society where many traditions have been discredited, an interest in modernity can result in a restless sophistication. Mehmet Ertegun seems not to have been a restless man.

Having uncritically accepted [Western] culture in everything, we now find we have lost our hold on the autonomous ideals of the Japanese race.

National cultures and heritages must compete for man's attention with the mind-absorbing advances of universal science.

It would be a sad day for India if it has to inherit the English scale and the English tastes so utterly unsuitable to the Indian environment.

India is a curious place that still preserves the past, religions, and its history. No matter how modern India becomes, it is still very much an old country.

Civilisations which get cut off from their traditions and values do not survive for long.

We are under attack. Our culture, society, traditions, and way of life are at risk.

Over an extended period of time, if a culture does not entail any traditions...if there are no values or if there is no awareness or social consciousness...a heritage tradition can never be developed.

I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.

Indeed, this is an important characteristic of the globalization debate: the tendency toward glorifying all things indigenous even when they deserve to be left in the past.

I understand that and I have had very candid discussions with Saudi leaders in the past. I respect their culture and their heritage and their traditions, but I think that they now, as they move forward, will have to start examining these traditions and these practices to see whether or not change is appropriate.

What they fear, I think rightly, is that traditional Vietnamese society cannot survive the American economic and cultural impact.

There's no way to escape the culture that has evolved, from which we ourselves have evolved. Naturally, we stress it, break it up, reassemble it to suit our own needs. But it is there - a source of vital strength.

In many respects, I think 'Bless Me, Ultima' is a novel about the indigenous.

Culture is just a shambling zombie that repeats what it did in life; bits of it drop off, and it doesn't appear to notice.

It takes a strong effort on the part of each American Indian not to become Europeanized. The strength for this effort can only come from the traditional ways, the traditional values that our elders retain.

So we have to be careful because if you don't protect your culture you won't have it for very long.

I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'Well, what's going on?'

In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.

Even though I'm very Westernized as an individual and very Canadian, I guess I've lost some of my Chinese culture.

Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.

We regard those other cultures, such as that of India, where many people live and believe and behave much as they did 1,000 or 2,000 years ago, as undeveloped.

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.