Quotes by Archibald MacLeish

“The best road to progress is freedoms road.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”

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

“I think you have to deal with the confused situation that were faced with by seizing on the glimpses and particles of life, seizing on them and holding them and trying to make a pattern of them. In other words, trying to put a world back together again out of its fragmentary moments.”

“A world ends when its metaphor has died”

“The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defense are silent”

“A poem should not mean, But be”

“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.”

“To separate journalism and poetry, therefore-history and poetry-to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse, is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge.”

“Freedom is the right to ones dignity as a man.”

“Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a mans life if he has the weight and cares about the words.”

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

“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 be palpable and mute / As a globed fruit, / Dumb / As old medallions to the thumb . . . / A poem should be equal to / Not true . . . / A poem should not mean / But be.”

“What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.”

“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.”

“And there, there overhead, there hung over Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes, There in the starless dark the poise, the hover, There with vast wings across the cancelled skies, There in the sudden blackness the black pall, Of nothing,”

“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.”