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.

Archibald MacLeish

Categorized in : World Discovery Ignorance

Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.

Archibald MacLeish

nations democracy done

There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.

Archibald MacLeish

being-happy happiness inspirational

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

finals determination lying

The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.

Archibald MacLeish

horse pigs men

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

democracy done gold

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

oil gold peace

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

patriotism freedom thinking

A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.

Archibald MacLeish

sick hate men

That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.

Archibald MacLeish

atheism expectations ideas

There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.

Archibald MacLeish

dawn grass wind

Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.

Archibald MacLeish

humans answers love-is

If God is God He is not good, if God is good He is not God; take the even, take the odd.

Archibald MacLeish

positive-atheism atheism odd

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.

Archibald MacLeish

patriotic 4th-of-july dream

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.

Archibald MacLeish

liberty freedom silence

Man depends on God for all things: God depends on man for one. Without man's love God does not exist as God, only as creator, and love is the one thing no one, not even God himself, can command. It is a free gift or it is nothing. And it is most itself, most free, when it is offered in spite of suffering, of injustice, and of death . . . The justification of the injustice of the universe is not our blind acceptance of God's inexplicable will, nor our trust in God's love, his dark and incomprehensible love, for us, but our human love, notwithstanding anything, for him.

Archibald MacLeish

acceptance dark love-is

See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.

Archibald MacLeish

blue beautiful science

A poem should not mean but be.

Archibald MacLeish

poetry should mean

History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.

Archibald MacLeish

occasional spots concerts

A self-advertising writer is always a self-extinguished writer.

Archibald MacLeish

advertising self

Never in all their history have men been able truly to conceive of the world as one: a single sphere, a globe, having the qualities of a globe, a round earth in which all the directions eventually meet, in which there is no center because every point, or none, is center - an equal earth which all men occupy as equals. The airman's earth, if free men make it, will be truly round: a globe in practice, not in theory.

Archibald MacLeish

space practice men