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When liberty is headlong girl
And runs her roads and wends her ways
Liberty will shriek and whirl
Her showery torch to see it blaze.
When liberty is wedded wife
And keeps the barn and counts the byre
Liberty amends her life.
She drowns her torch for fear of fire.

— Archibald MacLeish

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Freedom

More quotes by Archibald MacLeish

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.

All Archibald MacLeish quotes →

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Archibald MacLeish (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.