A Quote by William Pfaff

The achievement of nationhood is a product not only of time and circumstance but usually of war and suffering as well.

William Pfaff

Quote Topics

Achievement Circumstance Only Product Suffering Time War Well

Quote Author

William Pfaff
American - Author
December 29, 1928 - April 30, 2015

Palestinians have balked every time their longed-for nationhood has come within grasp. They have seemed to prefer the aggrieved dignity of their resentments to the challenges of nationhood.

Shelby Steele

I've always believed that the best way you combat intellectual property theft is making a product available that is well priced, well timed to market, whether it's a movie product, TV product, music product, even theme-park product.

Bob Iger

Yes, there's a higher rate of people living below the poverty line who aren't vaccinated. But it's much rarer for that to be a product of choice than a product of circumstance.

Eula Biss

War is not the only arena where peace is done to death. Wherever suffering is ignored, there will be the seeds of conflict, for suffering degrades and embitters and enrages.

Aung San Suu Kyi

In North America, what happens often is that they put race before nationhood. Everyone here is Hispanic-American, Chinese-American, African-American. But really, we're just North Americans of all these different descents. The only time I notice North Americans becoming national is when a war happens or a crisis happens.

Mark Bradford

No one has a monopoly on our unending story of nationhood; no one has the manual for our nationhood.

John Tamihere

A change in external circumstances without inner renewal is a materialist's illusion, as though man were only a product of his social circumstance and nothing else.

Jurgen Moltmann

And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive--in other words, only what is conducive to welfare--is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.

Charles Darwin

What's going on in Syria is the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. And we are punishing those who are suffering most in this circumstance, in this condition. We vet refugees from Syria for a period of 18 to 24 months before they're allowed to come to the United States. And, you know, if you will permit me, I think we know more about them by the time they get here than we know about the president's finances.

Daniel Benjamin

You have only to play at Little Wars three or four times to realize just what a blundering thing Great War must be. Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion. Not only are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason, but-the available heads we have for it, are too small. That, I think, is the most pacific realization conceivable, and Little War brings you to it as nothing else but Great War can do.

H. G. Wells

Peace, to have meaning for many who have only known suffering in both peace and war, must be translated into bread or rice, shelter, health and education, as well as freedom and human dignity.

Ralph Bunche

The U.S. has always understood itself to be united around political principles and not around culture, whereas the nations of Europe have a much more traditional conception of nationhood that is connected to romanticism, which thinks of religion and culture as ingredients of nationhood.

Martha Nussbaum

Now this, monks, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; seperation from what is pleasing is suffering... in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.

Gautama Buddha

Whoever would write books? It's suffering as well as greatly satisfying. And certainly there's suffering in the sense that you don't know for a long time how to do it.