Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf.
Interpretation
The quote criticizes modern compromises that settle for less than what is truly valuable.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote reflects on the idea that in the past, compromise was viewed as a reasonable acceptance of something lesser when faced with a lack of options. In contemporary times, however, he suggests that some leaders settle for a diminished version of what they could achieve, implying that they accept mediocrity instead of striving for the full potential of what is possible.
In practice
During a leadership seminar discussing effective negotiation strategies.
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.
A right to jury trial is granted to criminal defendants in order to prevent oppression by the Government.
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
If a man who has committed many a misdemeanor does not repent and cleanse his heart of the evil, retribution will come upon his person as sure as the streams run into the ocean which becomes ever deeper and wider. If a man who has committed a misdemeanor come to the knowledge of it, reform himself, and practise goodness, the force of retribution will gradually exhaust itself as a disease gradually loses its baneful influence when the patient perspires.
There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.
Without doubt, the Lord grants all favors which are asked of Him in Mass, provided they be fitting for us.
God gave you life and bestowed upon you his attributes; eventually you will return to him.
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