Archibald MacLeish Quotes

The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.
Archibald MacLeish
We have no choice but to be guilty God is unthinkable if we are innocent.
Archibald MacLeish
Around around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.
Archibald MacLeish
When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco... Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission—his life. ...Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book... was ever anything else than a report. ... A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence... it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded—Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer—everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book—it is still a "report" upon the "mystery of things."But if this is what a book is... then a library is an extraordinary thing. ...The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion. ... It asserts that... all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies. ...The library, almost alone of the great monuments of civilization, stands taller now than it ever did before. The city... decays. The nation loses its grandeur... The university is not always certain what it is. But the library remains: a silent and enduring affirmation that the great Reports still speak, and not alone but somehow all together...
Archibald MacLeish
To love love and not its meaning, hardens the heart in monstrous ways..." (The Rape Of The Swan)Footnote : A form of self-edification, infatuation, lust and the epitome of hedonism.
Archibald MacLeish
We knock upon silence for an answering music.
Archibald MacLeish
As things are now going, the peace we will make, the 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
What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.
Archibald MacLeish
What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it ex
Archibald MacLeish
What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it exists.", American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]
Archibald MacLeish
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
A poem should not meanBut be.
Archibald MacLeish
And here face down beneath the sunAnd here upon earth's noonward heightTo feel the always coming onThe always rising of the night
Archibald MacLeish
Around, around the sun we go:The moon goes round the earth.We do not die of death:We die of vertigo.
Archibald MacLeish