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Archibald MacLeish
10 quotes
“A poem should not mean But be.”
Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ars Poetica", Collected Poems, 1917-1982 (1985)
“Races didn't bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world. And their manners were their own business. And so were their politics. And so, but ten times so, were their souls.”
Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The American Cause", address delivered at Faneuil Hall, Boston, Massachusetts (November 20, 1940); reported in MacLeish, A Time to Act; Selected Addresses (1943), p. 115
“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”
Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) first seen 1956 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In Praise of Dissent", New York Times (16 December 1956)
“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.”
Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Return from the Excursion, Riders on Earth (1978)
“What is more important in a library than anything else — is the fact that it exists.”
Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Premise Of Meaning" in American Scholar (5 June 1972)
“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.”
Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Now Let Us Address the Main Question: Bicentennial of What?, New York Times (3 July 1976)
“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.”
Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Moonlighting on Yale Field, Riders on Earth (1978)
“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.”
Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Art and Law, Riders on Earth (1978)
“If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God.”
Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) said by 1982 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dialogue from MacLeish's play J.B., an adaptation of the Bible's Book of Job, also quoted in The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates (2012) by Howard Bloom
“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.”
Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The New York Times, December 25, 1968 quoted in the book "Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations" by James H. Billington, Library of Congress