Archibald MacLeish Quotes & Sayings

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

“Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”