Quotes from Archibald MacLeish

And here face down beneath the sun And here upon earth's noonward height To feel the always coming on The always rising of the night

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.

You wanted justice ,didn't you?There isn't any...there is only love." - J.B's wife

When one expects to go on "forever" as one does in one's youth or even middle age, horizons are merely limits, not yet ends. It is when one first sees the horizon as an end that one first begins to see.

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

As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief... without moral purpose or human interest.

We knock upon silence for an answering music.

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

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

American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse. American domestic policies were conducted under a kind of upside-down Russian veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record as detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted, from a peace plan at one end to a military budget at the other, unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn't like it.

You wanted justice and there was none- only love.

At Ghent the wind rose. There was a smell of rain and a heavy drag Of wind in the hedges but not as the wind blows Over fresh water when the waves lag Foaming and the willows huddle and it will rain . . .

It is the strategy which is appropriate to our cause and to our purpose--the strategy of truth--the strategy which opposes to the frauds and the deceits by which our enemies have confused and conquered other peoples, the simple and clarifying truths by which a nation such as our must guide itself.

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.

The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.

What surf Of what far sea upon what unknown ground Troubles forever with that asking sound? What surge is this whose question never ceases?

En ocasiones, en la vieja casa encantada del cerebro, oigo a lo lejos, alguna puerta olvidada. La música de una lejana fiesta espectral, y la agitación de los ecos bajo el chirriante suelo.

They also live Who swerve and vanish in the river.

Oh, Strange! It's always strange the heart is: only it's the skin we ever know.

What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists.

You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.

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.

Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.

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.