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Wartime measures typically encourage a high degree of political, social and intellectual conformity. The general idea is that, in the face of an existential challenge from a vicious enemy, criticism of the government ought to cease.

— Pankaj Mishra

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Society

More quotes by Pankaj Mishra

Supremacy of all stripes—racial, ethnic, national—works in insidious ways, burrowing deep inside impeccably liberal minds…

As a writer I am more interested in describing the past accurately than in outlining the future; we need a new past if we are to make sense of our intolerable present or work to change it…

Awakening late to the pandemic, authoritarian or authoritarian-minded leaders have turned it into an opportunity both to shore up their power and to conceal their stunning ineptitude. To fail to see through their manufactured fog of war, as many in the media are doing, can only further endanger the long-term moral and political health of their societies.

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

One country, one constitution, one destiny.

Daniel Webster

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Pankaj Mishra (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.