“Keepers of books, keepers of print and paper on the shelves, librarians are keepers also of the records of the human spiritthe records of men's watch upon the world and on themselves.” MenWorldHumansBookWatchesRecordsPaperPrintShelvesHuman SpiritLibrarianKeepers Author:Archibald MacLeish
“If the art of poetry is?the art of making sense of the chaos of human experience, it's not a bad thing to see a lot of chaos.” IfsHumansArtChaosMake SensePoetry IsBad ThingsHuman Experience Author:Archibald MacLeish
“The task of man is not to discover new worlds, but to discover his own world in terms of human comprehension and beauty.” MenWorldHumansTermBeautyTasksNew WorldComprehension Author:Archibald MacLeish
“Our reliance in this country is on the inquiring, individual human mind. Our strength is founded there; our resilience, our ability to face an ever-changing future and to master it. We are not frozen into the backward-facing impotence of those societies, fixed in the rigidness of an official dogma, to which the future is the mirror of the past. We are free to make the future for ourselves.” MindHumansCountryPastFacesIndividualAbilityMastersMirrorsResilienceFixedOfficialsHuman MindDogmaFrozenRelianceImpotenceInquiring Author:Archibald MacLeish
“. . . 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.” MenWorldNeedsHumansArtReasonFactsHumanityTermGenerationsCreationGoes OnSevenAccomplishedSpiteSundayNew WorldComprehensionRecreationSeven DaysPhidias Author:Archibald MacLeish
“Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.” HumansAnswersLove IsUltimate Author:Archibald MacLeish
“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.” MenHumansDoeSufferingUniverseDarkLove IsOne ThingAcceptanceDependsAll ThingsAnd LoveBlindInjusticeCreatorCommandGod LoveSpiteTrust In GodJustificationGod's LoveInexplicableHuman LoveFree GiftsBlind Acceptance Author:Archibald MacLeish
“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.” ThinkingHumansMomentsFreedomHuman BeingsLibertyEnvironmentRevolutionEthicsSocial JusticeEnvironmentalPatriotismDissentHerds Author:Archibald MacLeish
“The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.” GivingHumansLawOrderAtheismPossibilityDignityPositive AtheismLawyerConfusionMake SenseHuman LifeScope Author:Archibald MacLeish
“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.” HumansSeemsPurposePeaceInterestMoralGoldOilShipping Author:Archibald MacLeish
“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.” HumansBeliefLibertyGreaterAtheismPositive Atheism Author:Archibald MacLeish
“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.” MenHumansProblemDeathPurposeCitiesHappenedModernRelationPopulationDefinedTriumphBurnedBreakthroughModern ScienceHiroshima Author:Archibald MacLeish
