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

- William Pfaff

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: th…

- William Pfaff

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

- William Pfaff

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…

- William Pfaff

But Americans are different from everyone else in the world - except the Canadians, and Americans are more different from the Canadians than they oft…

- William Pfaff

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

- William Pfaff

Europeans believe in democracy - or, at least, in republican government - but they have considered the alternatives, and continue to do so, and that …

- William Pfaff

The moral spectacle of capitalism still offends, as does American capitalism's implacable insistence that the market determine value even in the poli…

- William Pfaff

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

- William Pfaff