Pankaj sharma Quotes

“Enlightenment values of individual freedom are manifested best in individual acts of criticism and defiance.”

“Thinking of possibilities is like driving a car on a freeway. You have an open road that stretches endlessly before you where your thoughts are not shackled. But when we say 'impossible,' we have already reached a dead-end in our minds. So dwell on possibilities to open up your horizon.”

“Democracy, loudly upheld as a cure for much of the ailing world, has proved no guarantor of political wisdom, even if it remains the least bad form of government.”

“If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there's going to be some kind of friction.”

“The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later, the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan.”

“In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English.”

“National independence, and the preceding political struggles, helped create the space for literary creation in many post-colonial countries. Much of modern Indian or Chinese literature is inconceivable without the political movement for freedom from foreign rule.”

“In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Japan had put forward a proposal to guarantee racial equality at the League of Nations, but Woodrow Wilson overturned it in the face of majority support.”

“As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories.”