Archibald MacLeish Quotes

Archibald MacLeish feels like a thoughtful wanderer, sharing musings on society, life and freedom.

17 quotes

1. 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.

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

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. Never in all their history have men been able truly to conceive of the world as one: a single sphere, a globe, having the qualities of a globe, a round earth in which all the directions eventually meet, in which there is no center because every point, or none, is center - an equal earth which all men occupy as equals. The airman's earth, if free men make it, will be truly round: a globe in practice, not in theory.

7. How shall freedom be defended? By arms when it is attacked by arms, by truth when it is attacked by lies, by faith when it is attacked by authoritarian dogma. Always, in the final act, by determination and faith.

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

9. What you really have to know is one: yourself. And the only way you can know that one is in the mirror of the others. And the only way you can see into the mirror of the others is by love or its opposite—by profound emotion. Certainly not by curiosity—by dancing around asking, looking, making notes. You have to live relationships to know.

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

11. 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.

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

13. The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.

14. 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.

15. Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast.

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

17. A poem should not mean but be.