Archibald MacLeish quotes

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

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

Archibald MacLeish

A poem should not mean, but be.

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

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

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

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

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

What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.

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

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

Archibald MacLeish

Without guilt
What is a man? An animal, isn't he?
A wolf forgiven at his meat,
A beetle innocent in his copulation.

Archibald MacLeish

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

Archibald MacLeish

There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.

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 see the earth as we now see it, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night, brothers who see now they are truly brothers.

Archibald MacLeish

Poets are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.

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

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

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

Archibald MacLeish

We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent.

Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be palpable and mute.

Archibald MacLeish

A world ends when its metaphor has died.

Archibald MacLeish

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

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.

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

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

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

To see the earth as we now see it, small and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night, brothers who see now they are truly brothers.

Archibald MacLeish

What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.

Archibald MacLeish

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

Archibald MacLeish