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Archibald Macleish Quotes

Archibald MacLeish 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 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 University. He was awarded three Pulitzer Prizes for his work. Wikipedia  

✵ 7. May 1892 – 20. April 1982   •   Other names Арчибальд Макліш
Archibald Macleish photo
Archibald Macleish: 12   quotes 0   likes

Famous Archibald Macleish Quotes

“A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off”

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 (16 December 1956)

“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

Now Let Us Address the Main Question: Bicentennial of What?, New York Times (3 July 1976)

“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

Return from the Excursion, Riders on Earth (1978)

“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

"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

Archibald Macleish Quotes

“A poem should not mean
But be.”

Archibald Macleish

"Ars Poetica", Collected Poems, 1917-1982 http://books.google.com/books?id=KI0ESFOvi5QC&q=%22A+poem+should+not+mean+But+be%22&pg=PA107#v=onepage (1985)

“What is more important in a library than anything else — is the fact that it exists.”

Archibald Macleish

"The Premise Of Meaning" in American Scholar (5 June 1972)

“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

Art and Law, Riders on Earth (1978)

Life , Law , Business , Sense

“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

As quoted in Richard Nixon's First Inaugural Address (20 January 1969)
Attributed

Beauty , Silence

“If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God.”

Archibald Macleish

Dialogue from MacLeish's play J.B. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.B._(play), an adaptation of the Bible's Book of Job, also quoted in The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates (2012) by Howard Bloom

God

“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

Moonlighting on Yale Field, Riders on Earth (1978)

Life , Wisdom , Football

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