Archibald MacLeish

Archibald MacLeish (May 7, 1892 – April 20, 1982) was an American poet and writer, who was associated with the modernist school of poetry. MacLeish studied English at Yale University and law at Harvard University. He enlisted in and saw action during the First World War and lived in Paris in the 1920s. On returning to the United States, he contributed to Henry Luce's magazine Fortune from 1929 to 1938. For five years, MacLeish was the ninth Librarian of Congress, a post he accepted at the urging of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. From 1949 to 1962, he was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. He was awarded three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.

Quotes

Archibald MacLeish once said, "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.”

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

"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." Archibald MacLeish

"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." Archibald MacLeish

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

"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 "In Praise of Dissent". New York Times, December 16, 1956.

"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." Archibald MacLeish

"The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent." Archibald MacLeish (1940). “A Time to Speak: The Selected Prose of Archibald MacLeish”, Boston, Mifflin

"If God is God He is not good, if God is good He is not God; take the even, take the odd." Archibald MacLeish (1958). “J. B.”

"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." Archibald MacLeish (1941). “The American cause”

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

"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." Archibald MacLeish

"Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question." Archibald MacLeish

"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." Archibald MacLeish

"We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent." Archibald MacLeish (1958). “J. B.”

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

"There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass." Archibald MacLeish (1985). “Collected Poems, 1917-1982”, p.41,

"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." Archibald MacLeish "The American Cause". Address delivered at Faneuil Hall, Boston, Massachusetts, November 20, 1940.

"A poem should not mean but be." Archibald MacLeish

"As things are now going the peace we make, what 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." Archibald MacLeish

"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." Archibald MacLeish

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

"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." Archibald MacLeish

In the play The Fall of the City by Arch ibald MacLeish:

The city of masterless men

will take a master.

There will be shouting then:

Blood after!

The Messenger describes the life of those who have been conquered as one of terror – "Their words are their murderers – Judged before judgment", even as many of them actively invite the oppressor in.

What is the surest defender of liberty?

Is it not liberty?

A free people resists by freedom:

Not locks! Not blockhouses!

The future is a mirror where the past

Marches to meet itself. Go armed towards arms!

Peaceful towards peace! Free and with music towards freedom!

Face tomorrow with knives and tomorrow's a knife-blade.

The man is worn by the knife.

Once depend on iron for your freedom and your

Freedom's iron!

Once overcome your resisters with force and your

Force will resist you!

You will never be free of force.

Never of arms unarmed ...

Force is a greater enemy than this conqueror,

A treacherous weapon.

Freedom's the rarest bird!

You risk your neck to snare it . . .

It's gone while your eyeballs stare!

Those who'd lodge with a tyrant

Thinking to feed at his fire

And leave him again when they're fed are

Plain fools or were bred to it.

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