William Pfaff Quotes

The accounts that history presents have to be paid. Past has to be reconciled with present in the life of a nation. History is an insistent force: the past is what put us where we are. the past cannot be put behind until it is settled with.

Foreign policy deals across time as well as space.

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.

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

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

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.

These choices by small countries are vital for them, but may be more momentous than commonly understood for others as well, including the major powers, who presumptuously believe they are in control of events.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.