Quote

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

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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
America
Endlessness
Ever
Maps
Might
Opening
Make
Courage
Would
Forever
Men
Face
Think
Faces
Thinking
Hope

More quotes by Archibald MacLeish

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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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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 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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Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
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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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See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
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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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Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
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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.
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You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.
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There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
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Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
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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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Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
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A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.
Archibald MacLeish
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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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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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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
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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.
Archibald MacLeish