Archibald MacLeish Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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.”

“There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream.”

“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”

“We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent.”

“Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.”

“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.”

“You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”