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.
It takes billions of years to create a human being. And it takes only a few seconds to die.
Don't run your life by what's legal or illegal. Run your life based on what's right or wrong.
My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.
The harsh truth is that 'respectability' is the exorbitant tax we African Americans are forced to pay daily as we try to live out our versions of the American Dream.
Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
Government power must be dispersed. If government is to exercise power, better in the county than in the state, better in the state than in Washington. If I do not like what my local community does, be it in sewage disposal, or zoning, or schools, I can move to another local community, and though few may take this step, the mere possibility acts as a check. If I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations.
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