Quote

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.

William Pfaff

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Pfaff
Age: 86 †
Born: 1928
Born: December 29
Died: 2015
Died: April 30
Author
Journalist
Soldier
Writer
Council Bluffs
Iowa
Believe
Alternatives
Considered
Continue
Americans
Republican
Democracy
Least
Government
Europeans

More quotes by William Pfaff

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