Americans are a very backward people, with all the real virtues of a backward people; the patriarchal simplicity and human dignity of a democracy, and a respect for labor uncorrupted by cynicism.
Interpretation
Chesterton critiques American society by highlighting its virtues and the simplicity of its democracy.
In this quote, Gilbert K. Chesterton reflects on American society, suggesting that despite being seen as backward, there are inherent virtues such as simplicity, human dignity, and a genuine respect for labor. He appears to admire these qualities that arise from a less complicated, more straightforward way of living, contrasting them with the cynicism found in more modern or advanced societies.
In practice
During a lecture on cultural values, one might use this quote to discuss the importance of simplicity and respect for labor in defining a society's character.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial.
The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.
There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
And I, the former mystic, was thinking: Yes, man is stronger, greater than God. When Adam and Eve deceived You, You chased them from paradise. When You were displeased by Noah’s generation, You brought down the Flood. When Sodom lost Your favour, You caused the heavens to rain down fire and damnation. But look at these men whom You have betrayed, allowing them to be tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned, what do they do? They pray before You! They praise Your name!
History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again.
But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.
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