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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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Archibald MacLeish
Age: 89 †
Born: 1892
Born: May 7
Died: 1982
Died: April 20
Lawyer
Librarian
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
University Teacher
Writer
Glencoe
Illinois
Make
Business
Reduce
Time
Sense
Confusion
Life
Order
Lawyer
Give
Dignity
Human
Atheism
Humans
Possibility
Giving
Law
Even
Call
Scope
More quotes by Archibald MacLeish
Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
Archibald MacLeish
The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.
Archibald MacLeish
The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
Archibald MacLeish
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
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.
Archibald MacLeish
There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.
Archibald MacLeish
The roots of the grass strain, Tighten, the earth is rigid, waits-he is waiting- And suddenly, and all at once, the rain!
Archibald MacLeish
If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.
Archibald MacLeish
The task of man is not to discover new worlds, but to discover his own world in terms of human comprehension and beauty.
Archibald MacLeish
The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.
Archibald MacLeish
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.
Archibald MacLeish
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
What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.
Archibald MacLeish
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
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
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.
Archibald MacLeish
A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.
Archibald MacLeish
The map of America is a map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever and ever. No man's face would make you think of it but his hope might, his courage might.
Archibald MacLeish
A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.
Archibald MacLeish
Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
Archibald MacLeish
