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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.

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
Truth
Finals
Always
Determination
Lies
Arms
Authoritarian
Shall
Defended
Lying
Attacked
Freedom
Dogma
Faith
Final

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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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A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.
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Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
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A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off
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The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
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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.
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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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Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.
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What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.
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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.
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The task of man is not to discover new worlds, but to discover his own world in terms of human comprehension and beauty.
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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.
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The roots of the grass strain, Tighten, the earth is rigid, waits-he is waiting- And suddenly, and all at once, the rain!
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As things are now going the peace we make, what peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace in brief.without moral purpose or human interest.
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A poem should not mean but be.
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You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.
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There are those, I know, 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.
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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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Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
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