Archibald MacLeish Quotes

• To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold – brothers who know now they are truly brothers.

   

  Archibald MacLeish

• There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream.

  Archibald MacLeish

• The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life – to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.

  Archibald MacLeish

• Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England.

  Archibald MacLeish

• Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.

  Archibald MacLeish

• 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 it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.

  Archibald MacLeish

• Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.

  Archibald MacLeish

• 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 in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.

  Archibald MacLeish

• Freedom is the right to one’s dignity as a man.

  Archibald MacLeish

• 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 thing only that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold.

  Archibald MacLeish

• 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 has the weight and cares about the words.

  Archibald MacLeish

• A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.

  Archibald MacLeish

• The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Topics in Dissent

  Tags in Integrity/Individuality

• 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 gold, a peace of shipping, a peace in brief.without moral purpose or human interest.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Topics in Politics

  Tags in Injustice, Material Possessions

Archibald MacLeish (34)

Birth:	7th May, 1892
Death:	20th April, 1982
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Essayist, Lawyer, Librarian, Playwright, Poet

About

Archibald MacLeish was born in Glencoe, Illinois. He was an American poet, writer, and the Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the Modernist school of poetry. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.  He attended the Hotchkiss School from 1907 to 1911 before entering Yale University, where he majored in English, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was selected for the Skull and Bones society. He then enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review.  He graduated from law school in 1919, taught law for a semester for the government department at Harvard, then worked briefly as an editor for The New Republic. He next spent three years practicing law.

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