Archibald MacLeish Quotes

There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.

Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.

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.

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

The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.

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

To see the earth as we now see it, small 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.

Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.

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

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.

Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only, that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold.

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 is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.

A poem should not mean but be.

What is wrong is not the great discoveries of science—information is always better than ignorance, no matter what information or what ignorance. What is wrong is the belief behind the information, the belief that information will change the world. It won’t.

Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.

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

If God is God He is not good, if God is good He is not God; take the even, take the odd.

The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.

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.

If you commit yourself to the art of poetry, you commit yourself to the task of learning how to see, using words as elements of sight and their sounds as prisms. And to see means to see something worth all the agony of learning how to see.

We have learned the answers, all the answers: it is the question that we do not know.

Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.

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