Quotes from Archibald MacLeish

Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it.

To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold - brothers who know now they are truly brothers.

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

Beauty is that Medusa's head which men go armed to seek and sever, and dead will starve and sting forever.

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

But what is more important in a library than anything else — than everything else — is the fact that it exists.

A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs.

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.

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

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.

If the art of poetry is?the art of making sense of the chaos of human experience, it's not a bad thing to see a lot of chaos.

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

To love love and not its meaning, hardens the heart in monstrous ways..." (The Rape Of The Swan)Footnote : A form of self-edification, infatuation, lust and the epitome of hedonism.

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

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

That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.

Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.

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.

There are those 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.

Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.