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Absurdity
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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
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America
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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.
-Archibald MacLeish
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America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
-Archibald MacLeish
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The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it.
-Archibald MacLeish
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Conformity & Nonconformity
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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
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Democracy
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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
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Football
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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
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Freedom
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What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.
-Archibald MacLeish
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Hate
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A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.
-Archibald MacLeish
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Humanity
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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
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Law
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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
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Liberty
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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
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Libraries
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What is more important in a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it exists.
-Archibald MacLeish, The Premise of Meaning, in American Scholar, (Washington, D.C.), June 5, 1972
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Progress
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Wildness and silence disappeared from the countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fall but because throughways had to floor the meadows with cement to carry the automobiles which advancing technology produced.... Tropical beaches turned into high-priced slums where thousand-room hotels elbowed each other for glimpses of once-famous surf not because those who loved the beaches wanted them there but because enormous jets could bring a million tourists every year
-Archibald MacLeish, "Saturday Review (New York)", July 9, 1968
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War
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What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.
-Archibald MacLeish
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Books by and about Archibald MacLeish