The frontier that remains is is the interior one, the most forbidding and mysterious frontier.
Chapter 7, The Possibility of Extravagant Waste, p. 189 |
America's problem is how to free itself from the grip of it's exhausted ideas.
William PfaffFor 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 PfaffEuropeans 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 PfaffWe Americans really seem to be the only truly non-socialist economy on earth.
William PfaffThe problems of elites is an old one for which Americans have found no solid answer.
William PfaffThe 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 PfaffBut 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 PfaffThe center holds; passion falls away. That is what happened ideologically in Western Europe over recent years.
William PfaffOne cannot say that it will never happen again, or that it cannot happen.
William PfaffThe achievement of nationhood is a product not only of time and circumstance but usually of war and suffering as well.
William PfaffForeign policy deals across time as well as space.
William PfaffIt 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 PfaffA great nation's foreign policy involves power, money, trade, oil and arms, but it proeeds from ideas.
William PfaffThe truth is that history constantly presents new problems in the guise of old.
William PfaffOur culture is teleological-it presumes purposive development and a conclusion.
William PfaffOur culture is teleological-it presumes purposive development and a conclusion.
William Pfaff