Archibald MacLeish Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Archibald MacLeish

  Inspirational, Happiness, Being Happy

  41 Copy quote

• Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Democracy, Done, Nations

  Archibald MacLeish (1941). “The American cause”

  54 Copy quote

• 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, Silence, Liberty

  30 Copy quote

• 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.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Determination, Lying, Finals

  24 Copy quote

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

  Archibald MacLeish

  Hate, Men, Sick

  45 Copy quote

• The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Horse, Men, Pigs

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  Freedom, Thinking, Patriotism

  "In Praise of Dissent". New York Times, December 16, 1956.

  21 Copy quote

• 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

  Beautiful, Nature, Brother

  Riders on the Earth "Bubble of Blue Air" (1978)

  12 Copy quote

• Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Art, Understanding, Alive

  Recalled on his death, 20 Apr1982.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Dream, 4th Of July, Patriotic

  13 Copy quote

• 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.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Art, Mean, Sight

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Gold, Democracy, Done

  Archibald MacLeish (1941). “The American cause”

  10 Copy quote

• What is wrong is not the great discoveries of science—information is always better than ignorance, no matter what information or what ignorance. What is wrong is the belief behind the information, the belief that information will change the world. It won’t.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Ignorance, Discovery, World

  5 Copy quote

• There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Wind, Dawn, Grass

  Archibald MacLeish (1985). “Collected Poems, 1917-1982”, p.41, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  14 Copy quote

• We have learned the answers, all the answers: it is the question that we do not know.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Atheism, Questions And Answers, Knows

  1928 'The Hamlet of A. MacLeish'.

  4 Copy quote

• If God is God He is not good, if God is good He is not God; take the even, take the odd.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Atheism, Odd, Positive Atheism

  Archibald MacLeish (1958). “J. B.”

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Character, Frustration, America

  Archibald MacLeish (1978). “Riders on the Earth: essays and recollections”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

  57 Copy quote

• 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

  Freedom, Exercise, Men

  26 Copy quote

• A poem should not mean but be.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Mean, Poetry, Should

  "Ars Poetica" l. 23 (1926)

  14 Copy quote

• A world ends when its metaphor has died.

  Archibald MacLeish

  World, Metaphor, Ends

  Archibald MacLeish (1976). “New & collected poems, 1917-1976”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

  4 Copy quote

• Man depends on God for all things: God depends on man for one. Without man's love God does not exist as God, only as creator, and love is the one thing no one, not even God himself, can command. It is a free gift or it is nothing. And it is most itself, most free, when it is offered in spite of suffering, of injustice, and of death . . . The justification of the injustice of the universe is not our blind acceptance of God's inexplicable will, nor our trust in God's love, his dark and incomprehensible love, for us, but our human love, notwithstanding anything, for him.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Acceptance, Dark, Love Is

  12 Copy quote

• Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Love Is, Answers, Humans

  13 Copy quote

• That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Ideas, Expectations, Atheism

  13 Copy quote

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

  Archibald MacLeish

  Mind, Silent, Should

  Archibald MacLeish (1940). “A Time to Speak: The Selected Prose of Archibald MacLeish”, Boston, Mifflin

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Mirrors, Opposites, Dancing

  4 Copy quote

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