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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

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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
Everything
Librarian
Book
Library
Important
Exists
Reading
Fact
Facts
Else
Anything

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America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
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See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
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A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.
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To separate journalism and poetry, therefore-history and poetry-to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse, is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge.
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How shall freedom be defended? By arms when it is attacked by arms, by truth when it is attacked by lies, by faith when it is attacked by authoritarian dogma. Always, in the final act, by determination and faith.
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You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.
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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.
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That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.
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Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.
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History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.
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If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.
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The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.
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Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.
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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.
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Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it.
Archibald MacLeish
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What is wrong is not the great discoveries of science—information is always better than ignorance, no matter what information or what ignorance. What is wrong is the belief behind the information, the belief that information will change the world. It won’t.
Archibald MacLeish
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A poem should not mean but be.
Archibald MacLeish
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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
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A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.
Archibald MacLeish
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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