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America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.

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
Take
Promises
Promise
America

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.
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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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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You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.
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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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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
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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.
Archibald MacLeish
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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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There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
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
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Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
Archibald MacLeish
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Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it.
Archibald MacLeish
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A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.
Archibald MacLeish
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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.
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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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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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.
Archibald MacLeish
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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.
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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Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England.
Archibald MacLeish