Archibald MacLeish Quotes
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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.
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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.
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The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
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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.
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Beauty is that Medusa's head which men go armed to seek and sever, and dead will starve and sting forever.
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What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.
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A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.
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Around, around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.
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They also live Who swerve and vanish in the river.
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A world ends when its metaphor has died.
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What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.
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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.
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The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
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Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.
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A self-advertising writer is always a self-extinguished writer.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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. . . what humanity most desperately needs is not the creation of new worlds but the recreation in terms of human comprehension of the world we have -- and it is for this reason that arts go on for generation to generation in spite of the fact that Phidias has already carved and Homer has already sung. The creation, we are informed, was accomplished in seven days with Sunday off, but the recreation will never be accomplished because it is always accomplished anew for each generation of living men.
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Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.
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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.
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There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.
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Without guilt / What is a man? An animal, isn't he? / A wolf forgiven at his meat, / A beetle innocent in his copulation.
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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.
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If the art of poetry is?the art of making sense of the chaos of human experience, it's not a bad thing to see a lot of chaos.
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The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.
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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.
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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.
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America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
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What once was cuddled must learn to kiss The cold wonn's mouth. That's all the mystery.
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