Archibald MacLeish Quotes

59 quotes in 760 categories

• A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.
• The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
• Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one…
• The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but…
• Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.
• We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent.
• It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man…
• As things are now going the peace we make, what peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of…
• What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.
• Wildness and silence disappeared from the countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fall but because throughways had…
• We are as great as our belief in human liberty - no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is…
• What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had…
• Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he…
• Beauty is that Medusa's head which men go armed to seek and sever, and dead will starve and sting forever.
• How shall freedom be defended? By arms when it is attacked by arms, by truth when it is attacked by lies, by faith when it…
• If you commit yourself to the art of poetry, you commit yourself to the task of learning how to see, using words as elements of…
• Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
• Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say…
• What is wrong is not the great discoveries of science—information is always better than ignorance, no matter what information or what ignorance. What is wrong…
• Races didn't bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created…

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