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Quotes from Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends — William Pfaff

d. 2015

← All quotes by William Pfaff

18 quotes

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

Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989)

Foreign policy deals across time as well as space.

Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989)

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

Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989)

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

Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989)

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

Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989)

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

Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989)

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

Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989)

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

Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989)

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

Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989)

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

Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989)

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

Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989)

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.

Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989)

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.

Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989)

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.

Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989)

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.

Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989)

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.

Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989)

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.

Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989)

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.

Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: William Pfaff (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.