Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeishwas 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 World War One, and lived in Paris in the 1920s. On returning to the US, he contributed to Henry Luce's magazine Fortune from 1929 to 1938. For five year MacLeish was Librarian of Congress, a post he accepted at the urging of President Franklin D. Roosevelt...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth7 May 1892
CityGlencoe, IL
CountryUnited States of America
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.
A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.
A self-advertising writer is always a self-extinguished writer.
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.
Never in all their history have men been able truly to conceive of the world as one: a single sphere, a globe, having the qualities of a globe, a round earth in which all the directions eventually meet, in which there is no center because every point, or none, is center - an equal earth which all men occupy as equals. The airman's earth, if free men make it, will be truly round: a globe in practice, not in theory.
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.
See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.
History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.
There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.
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.
What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.