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The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.

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
Demand
Authority
Infantile
Time
Cowardice
Pattern
External
Demands
Patterns
Atheism

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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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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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There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast.
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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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Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.
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Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
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Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
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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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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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America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
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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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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.
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The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.
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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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Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it.
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