Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Science
Discoveries
Change
Discovery
Better
Ignorance
Matter
Behinds
Great
Behind
Always
Information
World
Belief
Wrong

More quotes by Archibald MacLeish

Image
The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
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
Image
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
Archibald MacLeish
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
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
Image
Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
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
Image
You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
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
Image
Children know the grace of god better than most of us. They see the world the way the morning brings it back to them new and born and fresh and wonderful.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
Archibald MacLeish