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Archibald MacLeish Quotes
1892–1982 United States
Archibald MacLeish (May 7, 1892 – April 20, 1982) was an American poet, writer and the Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the modernist school of poetry.
United States Academics Educators Lawyers Librarians Also known as: MacLeish, Archibald
Random Archibald MacLeish quote
13 quotes
What is more important in a library than anything else — is the fact that it exists.
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
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.
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.
To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue 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 eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers.
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.
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.
If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God.
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.
A poem should not mean
To see the earth as we now see it, small and blue 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.
When liberty is headlong girl
Religion is at its best when it makes us ask hard questions of ourselves. It is at its worst when it deludes us into thinking we have all the answers for everybody else.
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