In my head, I think I'd make a perfect spy, but in reality, I don't think I'd fare very well.
Jesus is ideal and wonderful, but you Christians - you are not like him.
No man in the world acts up to his own standard of right.
What? A great man? I only ever see the ape of his own ideal.
We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.
And while I was not an admirer of people in the specific, I liked them in the abstract. It is only the execution of the idea that disappoints.
Even though our non-Indian friends may cherish (the Declaration of Independence), I would say that we probably meet it with some mixed emotions among the Indian people. I would hope that during my lifetime, that people of all races would live up to the statements in the document.
I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write.
The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
I'm nothing like Romeo in real life.
My fine visions are all very well, but I must not forget they are absolutely unreal. I have a rosy sky and a green flowery Eden in my brain; but without, I am perfectly aware, lies at my feet a rough tract to travel, and around me gather black tempests to encounter.
That would have been a nice place, inside an idea, but it wasn't a place to live. It was necessary to live where the idea and the fact collided.
The social system tends to be dominated by images... especially of the future, which act cybernetically, constantly guided by perceived divergences between the real and the ideal.
