William Pfaff Quotes

Each generation confronts new problems, encounters new facts, and tells our history somewhat differently.

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

The older that we get and the different stages we go through in life, it seems like we become different people. But I think that the truth is you are always the same person. You just discover these new things about yourself.

The truth is that all civic and social change is friction. Politics is friction. The only way you can bend the arc of history is to create that kind of friction, which is something that makes most people incredibly uncomfortable but which, for whatever reason, because of my upbringing or because of my genetics, is something that doesn't bug me.

In one aspect, my works record the history of the development of Chinese society. Concern about the situation of Chinese reality is one important theme of my works. I am trying to ask, 'How does our society develop? What are the problems in our society? Where is our direction leading?'

History must not be treated as something set off by itself.

History is not was. It is.

History happens all around us.

It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present

History is not a blueprint for present practice.

Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

Falsehoods which we spurn to-day Were the truths of long ago.

No generation can escape history.

History is weirdly dismissed as not having anything to do with the present moment.

You can embrace nostalgia and history and tradition at the same time - it has to progress or it can't survive.

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

A theory in its day helps to solve the problems of the day.

Truth is a totality, the sum of many overlapping partial images. History, on the other hand, sacrifices totality in the interest of continuity.

All history is contemporary history.

All those [events in history] were such dramas as we see now, only with different actors.

Actions of the last age are like almanacs of the last year.

I am a part of history whether people want to take it seriously or not.

Time is what stops history happening at once; time is the speed at which the past disappears.

History is a river that never ends. Today is history, and I am here at the fountainhead.