All Quotes by Archibald MacLeish
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“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.”
“Around, around the sun we go:”
“A poem should not meanBut be.”
“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.”
“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”
“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.”
“What is more important in a library than anything else — is the fact that it exists.”
“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.”
“Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.”
“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.”
“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.”
“If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God.”
“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.”
“There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.”
“A poem should not mean”
“And here face down beneath the sun”
“And here face down beneath the sun”
“What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.”
“And here face down beneath the sun”