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

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

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update May 30, 2024. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The center holds; passion falls away. That is what happened ideologically in Western Europe over recent years." by William Pfaff?
William Pfaff photo
William Pfaff 18
American journalist 1928–2015

Related quotes

W.B. Yeats photo

“Things fall apart;
the center cannot hold…”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

Laozi photo

“When the center does not hold, the circle falls apart.”

Laozi (-604) semi-legendary Chinese figure, attributed to the 6th century, regarded as the author of the Tao Te Ching and fou…

This is a paraphrase of lines in "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats.
Misattributed

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi photo

“What's happened recently in Pakistan, India and Kuwait only goes to show that it's futile to imitate Western democracy. They've ended up exactly where they started.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

As quoted in Asadollah Alam (1991), The Shah and I: The Confidential Diary of Iran's Royal Court, 1968-77, page 506
Attributed

V.S. Naipaul photo
Jenny Han photo
D.H. Lawrence photo

“The Rhine is still the Rhine, the great divider... Immediately you are over the Rhine, the spirit of place has changed... It is as if the life had retreated eastwards. As if the Germanic life were slowly ebbing away from contact with western Europe, ebbing to the deserts of the east.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Source: 'A Letter from Germany', written 19 February 1924, printed in The New Statesman (13 October 1934), quoted in D. H. Lawrence, Selected Essays (1950), pp. 175-176

Stephen Harper photo
Fukuzawa Yukichi photo

“Whatever happens in the country, whatever warfare harasses our land, we will never relinquish our hold on Western learning.”

Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) Japanese author, writer, teacher, translator, entrepreneur and journalist who founded Keio University

Source: The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi (1897), Ch. X.
Context: Whatever happens in the country, whatever warfare harasses our land, we will never relinquish our hold on Western learning. As long as this school of ours stands, Japan remains a civilized nation of the world.

Kenzaburō Ōe photo

“The destination of the soul: this is what I, led on by Nils Holgersson, came to seek in the literature of Western Europe.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

Speech at the Nobel Banquet (10 December 1994) http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1994/oe-speech.html
Context: The destination of the soul: this is what I, led on by Nils Holgersson, came to seek in the literature of Western Europe. I fervently hope that my pursuit, as a Japanese, of literature and culture will, in some small measure, repay Western Europe for the light it has shed upon the human condition.

Related topics