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The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.

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
Defence
Silent
Heard
Possible
Mind
Perversion

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Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.
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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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America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
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The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
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A poem should not mean but be.
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See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
Archibald MacLeish
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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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Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak 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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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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
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History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.
Archibald MacLeish
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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.
Archibald MacLeish
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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
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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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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