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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
Time
Cowardice
Pattern
External
Demands
Patterns
Atheism
Demand
Authority
Infantile

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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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America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
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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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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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Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
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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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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 perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.
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Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
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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.
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History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.
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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.
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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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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
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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.
Archibald MacLeish
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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.
Archibald MacLeish
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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.
Archibald MacLeish
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If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.
Archibald MacLeish
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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.
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.
Archibald MacLeish