Archibald MacLeish

“What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.”

“A poem should not mean / But be.”

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

“What is freedom? The power to choose our own chains.”

“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”

“Journalism is literature in a hurry.”

“A world ends when its metaphor has died.”

“As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth... the love of the beautiful, the belief in the sanctity of the truth.”

“The first duty of a man is to think for himself.”

“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.”

“For all the history of grief, An empty doorway and a maple leaf.”

“A man who lives, not by what he feels but what he chooses, is a man.”

“A poem should not mean, but be.”

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

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

“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”

“The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life.”

“To see the world as the world is, is the only way to see the world as poetry.”

“The function of the writer is to make sense of life. It is his business to find the shape in things.”

“The thing about the American dream is that you have to be asleep to believe it.”