Quotes by Archibald MacLeish
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And crossed the dark defile at last, and found At Roncevaux upon the darkening plain...
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.
Nor now the long light on the sea— And here face downward in the sun...
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.
Without guilt / What is a man? An animal, isn't he? / A wolf forgiven at his meat, / A beetle innocent in his copulation.
(What is a dead girl but a shadowy ghost Or a dead man's voice but a distant and vain affirmation Like dream words most)
I will not speak of the famous beauty of dead women: I will say the shape of a leaf lay once on your hair....
To see the earth as we now see it, small and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night -- brothers who see now they are truly brothers.
Ambassador Puser the ambassador Reminds himself in French, felicitous tongue,...
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.
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
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