William Pfaff Quotes

William Pfaff was an American author, op-ed columnist for the International Herald Tribune and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Wikipedia  

✵ 29. December 1928 – 30. April 2015
William Pfaff photo
William Pfaff: 18 quotes1 like

Famous William Pfaff Quotes

“The center holds; passion falls away. That is what happened ideologically in Western Europe over recent years.”

William Pfaff

Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 2, The Challenge of Europe, p. 63.

“For four hundred years European civilization has dominated the world - for better or for worse. It is convenient, and flattering, for Americans to assume that this is all over; but it very rash to do so.”

William Pfaff

Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 2, The Challenge of Europe, p. 21.

“The truth is that history constantly presents new problems in the guise of old.”

William Pfaff

Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 5, Nationalism, p. 155.

“The achievement of nationhood is a product not only of time and circumstance but usually of war and suffering as well.”

William Pfaff

Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 5, Nationalism, p. 138.

“Europeans believe in democracy - or, at least, in republican government - but they have considered the alternatives, and continue to do so, and that scandalizes Americans.”

William Pfaff

Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 2, The Challenge of Europe, p. 23.

William Pfaff Quotes

“But Americans are different from everyone else in the world - except the Canadians, and Americans are more different from the Canadians than they often think.”

William Pfaff

Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 2, The Challenge of Europe, p. 52.

“The frontier that remains is is the interior one, the most forbidding and mysterious frontier.”

William Pfaff

Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 7, The Possibility of Extravagant Waste, p. 189.

“Our culture is teleological-it presumes purposive development and a conclusion.”

William Pfaff

Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 6, Japan, China and the Making of nations, p. 164.

“The moral spectacle of capitalism still offends, as does American capitalism's implacable insistence that the market determine value even in the political, intellectual, and artistic spheres.”

William Pfaff

Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 2, The Challenge of Europe, p. 31

“Foreign policy deals across time as well as space.”

William Pfaff

Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 5, Nationalism, p. 146.

“America's problem is how to free itself from the grip of it's exhausted ideas.”

William Pfaff

Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 1, Dead Stars, p. 11.

“The problems of elites is an old one for which Americans have found no solid answer.”

William Pfaff

Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 2, The Challenge of Europe, p. 28.

“A great nation's foreign policy involves power, money, trade, oil and arms, but it proeeds from ideas.”

William Pfaff

Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 5, Nationalism, p. 149.

“One cannot say that it will never happen again, or that it cannot happen.”

William Pfaff

Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 4, The Soviet Union, p. 107.

“We Americans really seem to be the only truly non-socialist economy on earth.”

William Pfaff

Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 2, The Challenge of Europe, p. 27.

“It is one of the perceptual defects of Western government and press to assign Western-style motives to what people do in non-Western societies, as if these are universally relevant.”

William Pfaff

Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 5, Nationalism, p. 147.

Similar authors

Helen Rowland photo
Helen Rowland13
American journalist None
Christopher Morley photo
Christopher Morley30
American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet None
H.L. Mencken photo
H.L. Mencken281
American journalist and writer None
Hunter S. Thompson photo
Hunter S. Thompson268
American journalist and author None
Ernest Hemingway photo
Ernest Hemingway501
American author and journalist None
Jack London photo
Jack London77
American author, journalist, and social activist None
Mario Benedetti photo
Mario Benedetti4
Uruguayan journalist, novelist, and poet None
Olavo de Carvalho photo
Olavo de Carvalho6
Brazilian journalist, essayist and professor of philosophy None
Italo Calvino photo
Italo Calvino44
Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels None
Svetlana Alexievich photo
Svetlana Alexievich8
Belarusian investigative journalist and non-fiction prose w… None