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

William Pfaff

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William Pfaff
Age: 86 †
Born: 1928
Born: December 29
Died: 2015
Died: April 30
Author
Journalist
Soldier
Writer
Council Bluffs
Iowa
America
Problem
Ideas
Grip
Exhausted
Free

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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.
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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.
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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.
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Foreign policy deals across time as well as space.
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The truth is that history constantly presents new problems in the guise of old.
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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.
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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.
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The achievement of nationhood is a product not only of time and circumstance but usually of war and suffering as well.
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The problems of elites is an old one for which Americans have found no solid answer.
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The center holds passion falls away. That is what happened ideologically in Western Europe over recent years.
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We Americans really seem to be the only truly non-socialist economy on earth.
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Our culture is teleological-it presumes purposive development and a conclusion.
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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.
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