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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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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
Music
Occasional
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Concerts
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Badly
Spots
Dead
Constructed
Heard
Concert
History
Hall
More quotes by Archibald MacLeish
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
Archibald MacLeish
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
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.
Archibald MacLeish
Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast.
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 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
Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
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
America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
Archibald MacLeish
A poem should not mean but be.
Archibald MacLeish
The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
Archibald MacLeish
If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.
Archibald MacLeish
There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
Archibald MacLeish
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.
Archibald MacLeish
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
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
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
Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
Archibald MacLeish
See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
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
