Archibald MacLeish Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

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
We are as great as our belief in human liberty — no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.

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

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
What is more important in a library than anything else—than everything else—is the fact that it exists.

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
The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it.

Archibald MacLeish
If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God.

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
To separate journalism and poetry, therefore-history and poetry-to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse, is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge.

Archibald MacLeish
Around, around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.

Archibald MacLeish
The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.

Archibald MacLeish
Plunge beneath the ledge of coral Where the silt of sunlight drifts Like dust that settles toward a floor — As slow as that: feel the lifting Surge that rustles white above But here is only movement deep As breathing: watch the reef fish hover Dancing in their silver sleep Around their stone, enchanted tree.

Archibald MacLeish
And there, there overhead, there, there hung over Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes, There in the starless dark the poise, the hover, There with vast wings across the canceled skies, There in the sudden blackness the black pall Of nothing, nothing, nothing — nothing at all.

Archibald MacLeish
You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.

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
The roots of the grass strain, Tighten, the earth is rigid, waits-he is waiting- And suddenly, and all at once, the rain!

Archibald MacLeish
Spacetime has no beginning and no end. It has no door where anything can enter. How break and enter what will only bend?

Archibald MacLeish
Poetry which owes no man anything, owes nevertheless one debt -
an image of the world in which men can again believe.

Archibald MacLeish
Abstractions are wonderfully clever tools for taking things apart and for arranging things in patterns but they are very little use in putting things together and no use at all when it comes to determining what things are for.

Archibald MacLeish
Keepers of books, keepers of print and paper on the shelves, librarians are keepers also of the records of the human spiritthe records of men's watch upon the world and on themselves.

Archibald MacLeish
It is not for nothing that the scholar invented the Ph.D. thesis as his principal contribution to literary form. The Ph.D. thesis is the perfect image of his world. It is done for the sake of doing work - perfectly conscientious, perfectly laborious, perfectly irresponsible.

Archibald MacLeish
Abstractions have a limiting, a dehumanizing, a dehydrating effect on the relation to things of the man who must live with them. The result is that we are more and more left, in our scientific society, without the means of knowledge of ourselves as we truly are or of our experience as it actually is.

Archibald MacLeish
We were the first that found that famous country: We marched by a king's name: we crossed the sierras: Unknown hardships we suffered: hunger.

Archibald MacLeish
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 People in the history of the world. And their manners were their own business. And so were their politics. And so, but ten times so, were their souls.

Archibald MacLeish
She lies on her left side her flank golden:
Her hair is burned black with the strong sun.
The scent of her hair is of rain in the dust on her shoulders:
She has brown breasts and the mouth of no other country.

Archibald MacLeish
Old age level light
evening in the afternoon
love without the bitterness and so
good-night

Archibald MacLeish
And here face downward in the sun To feel how swift how secretly The shadow of the night comes on.

Archibald MacLeish
America is promises to
Take!
America is promises to
To take them
Brutally
With love but
Take them.

Archibald MacLeish
A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard–by stealing what he has a taste for and can carry off.

Archibald MacLeish