Source: Mother of Storms (1994), p. 54
“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.
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William Pfaff 18
American journalist 1928–2015Related quotes

“Things fall apart;
the center cannot hold…”
Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“When the center does not hold, the circle falls apart.”
This is a paraphrase of lines in "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats.
Misattributed

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

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

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.

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.