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 More Quotes by Archibald MacLeish More Quotes From Archibald MacLeish Without guilt / What is a man? An animal, isn't he? / A wolf forgiven at his meat, / A beetle innocent in his copulation. Archibald MacLeish guilt animal men Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there. Archibald MacLeish journalism wish men 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 opposites men ideas We have learned the answers, all the answers: it is the question that we do not know. Archibald MacLeish questions-and-answers atheism knows Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts. Archibald MacLeish poet hurt men You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames. Archibald MacLeish flames cities house 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. Archibald MacLeish cities men death Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it. Archibald MacLeish speak men philosophy 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 apples real boys Poetry which owes no man anything, owes nevertheless one debt - Archibald MacLeish debt men believe . . . what humanity most desperately needs is not the creation of new worlds but the recreation in terms of human comprehension of the world we have -- and it is for this reason that arts go on for generation to generation in spite of the fact that Phidias has already carved and Homer has already sung. The creation, we are informed, was accomplished in seven days with Sunday off, but the recreation will never be accomplished because it is always accomplished anew for each generation of living men. Archibald MacLeish sunday men art Wildness and silence disappeared from the countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fall but because throughways had to floor the meadows with cement to carry the automobiles which advancing technology produced. Tropical beaches turned into high-priced slums where thousand-room hotels elbowed each other for glimpses of once-famous surf not because those who loved the beaches wanted them there but because enormous jets could bring a million tourists every year - and therefore did. Archibald MacLeish love beach fall 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. For the American citadel is a man. Not man in general. Not man in the abstract. Not the majority of men. But man. That man. His worth. His uniqueness. Archibald MacLeish What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Archibald MacLeish There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream. Archibald MacLeish man freedom humanity mind There are those 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 man freedom humanity mind To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold - brothers who know now they are truly brothers. Archibald MacLeish know silence together blue
