Archibald MacLeish Quotes - Page 2

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• 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

  Atheism, Liberty, Belief

  1976 'Now Let Us Address The Main Question: Bicentennial of What?', in the NewYork Times, 3 Jul.

  5 Copy quote

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

  Archibald MacLeish

  Choices, Innocence, Guilty

  Archibald MacLeish (1958). “J. B.”

  9 Copy quote

• Children know the grace of god better than most of us. They see the world the way the morning brings it back to them; new and born and fresh and wonderful.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Morning, Children, Grace

  Archibald MacLeish (1958). “J. B.”

  5 Copy quote

• Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Writing, Reality, Giving

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Feelings, Events, Looks

  Archibald MacLeish (1968). “A continuing journey”

  9 Copy quote

• The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Reading, Men, Should Have

  4 Copy quote

• A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Bird, Flight, Should

  'Ars Poetica' (1926)

  4 Copy quote

• Keepers of books, keepers of print and paper on the shelves, librarians are keepers also of the records of the human spiritthe records of men's watch upon the world and on themselves.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Book, Men, Watches

  1941 A Time to Speak,'Of the Librarian's Profession'.

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Boys, Apples

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Peace, Oil, Gold

  19 Copy quote

• History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Spots, Occasional, Concerts

  1967 In the Observer,12 Feb.

  10 Copy quote

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

  Archibald MacLeish

  Moon, Dying, Sun

  Archibald MacLeish (1985). “Collected Poems, 1917-1982”, p.87, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• Our reliance in this country is on the inquiring, individual human mind. Our strength is founded there; our resilience, our ability to face an ever-changing future and to master it. We are not frozen into the backward-facing impotence of those societies, fixed in the rigidness of an official dogma, to which the future is the mirror of the past. We are free to make the future for ourselves.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Country, Past, Mirrors

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Order, Law, Giving

  1972 'Apologia', in the Harvard Law Review, Jun.

  11 Copy quote

• The task of man is not to discover new worlds, but to discover his own world in terms of human comprehension and beauty.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Beauty, Men, Tasks

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Race, Self, People

  "The American Cause". Address delivered at Faneuil Hall, Boston, Massachusetts, November 20, 1940.

  14 Copy quote

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

  Archibald MacLeish

  Men, Dignity, Personal Dignity

  8 Copy quote

• Wildness and silence disappeared from the countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fall but because throughways had to floor the meadows with cement to carry the automobiles which advancing technology produced. Tropical beaches turned into high-priced slums where thousand-room hotels elbowed each other for glimpses of once-famous surf not because those who loved the beaches wanted them there but because enormous jets could bring a million tourists every year - and therefore did.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Love, Beach, Fall

  1968 'The Great American Frustration', in the Saturday Review, 9 Jul.

  16 Copy quote

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

  Archibald MacLeish

  Book, Reading, Thought Provoking

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

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Wish, Journalism

  4 Copy quote

• See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Beautiful, Science, Blue

  14 Copy quote

• 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.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Men, Practice, Space

  13 Copy quote

• A self-advertising writer is always a self-extinguished writer.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Self, Advertising

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Sports, Football, Wisdom

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

  7 Copy quote

• Poetry which owes no man anything, owes nevertheless one debt -
  an image of the world in which men can again believe.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Believe, Men, Debt

  5 Copy quote

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