William Appleman Williams > Quotes

“Faster cars, wider roads, and fancier fires do not make better picnics. Nor do cold wars produce warm hearts.”
― William Appleman Williams, The Contours of American History

“For it was the horrible reality of the ever increasing death and devastation in Vietnam that galvanized growing numbers of Americans to demand an end to the terror. The pulverizing destruction of a tiny nation in the name of self-determination, and the related barbarization of the once proud American Army, were gruesome and shameful ways to learn the nature of disaster. The final terror would come to be if ending the war did not lead to fundamental changes in the American outlook, in American society, and hence in American foreign policy.”
― William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy

“But the frontier in this meaning was a process of becoming, not of being, and hence substituted motion for structure as its end. Motion as a substitute for structure is possible only so long as there is unlimited room to move in. When confined without the discipline provided by an ideal, such social motion produces aimlessness or chaos—or perhaps the final ordering of some utopia.”
― William Appleman Williams, The Contours of American History

“Politicians become statesmen, not by honoring pious shibboleths, nor even by moving [people] to action with inspiring rhetoric, but by recognizing and then resolving the central dilemmas of their age.”
― William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy