Archibald MacLeish quotes

Archibald MacLeish was an American poet, playwright, and Librarian of Congress. His works often explored themes of democracy, history, and the human experience. He helped shape American literature and served as a prominent public intellectual. Here are 27 of his quotes:

What is more important in a library than anything else - is the fact that it exists. (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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Archibald MacLeish
The only thing about a man that is a man... is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Archibald MacLeish
If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God. View quote
Archibald MacLeish
A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man. View quote
Archibald MacLeish
A poem should not mean But be. (Archibald MacLeish)
There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience. View quote
Archibald MacLeish
There are those, I know, 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. View quote
Archibald MacLeish
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Archibald MacLeish
We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent. View quote
Archibald MacLeish
Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man. View quote
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. View quote
Archibald MacLeish
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 sight and their sounds as prisms. And to see means to see something worth all the agony of learning how to see. View quote
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. View quote
Archibald MacLeish
You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames. View quote
Archibald MacLeish