There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.
Interpretation
Chesteron criticizes the difference between the true nature of Americans and the unrealistic ideals set for them.
In this quote, Gilbert K. Chesterton suggests that the average American individual possesses inherent goodness and worth, but the flawed ideals imposed upon them create unrealistic expectations that lead to societal issues. Chesterton implies that the ideals often revered are what distort the true character of the people, encouraging a discrepancy between who they are and who they are expected to be.
In practice
In a speech on American values, one might refer to this quote to illustrate the gap between societal ideals and personal truths.
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.
I am one of billions. I am stardust gathered fleetingly into form. I will be ungathered. The stardust will go on to be other things someday and I will be free.
The awakening of the soul to its bondage and its effort to stand up and assert itself - this is called life.
Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the Soul.
How can we live in harmony? First we need to know we are all madly in love with the same God.
Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!
I don't like the word 'autobiography.' I rather like the term 'autofiction.' The second you make a script out of the story of your life, it becomes fictional. Of course, the truth is never far. But the story is created out of it.
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