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Popular Quotables
- “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National… (6,894)
- “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) (5,813)
- Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)] (5,731)
- Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (4,870)
- “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (4,840)
- “On The Conduct of Life” (1822) (3,923)
- “In Search of a Majority,” Speech,… (3,814)
- “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of… (3,670)
- “The Historian as Participant,” Daedalus… (3,080)
- “Hallowed Ground” (1825) (3,063)
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Adams, John • Bacon, Francis • Bible • Bierce, Ambrose • Billings, Josh • Butcher, Jim • Chesterton, Gilbert Keith • Churchill, Winston • Einstein, Albert • Eisenhower, Dwight David • Emerson, Ralph Waldo • Franklin, Benjamin • Fuller, Thomas (1654) • Gaiman, Neil • Galbraith, John Kenneth • Gandhi, Mohandas • Goethe, Johann von • Hazlitt, William • Heinlein, Robert A. • Hoffer, Eric • Huxley, Aldous • Ingersoll, Robert Green • James, William • Jefferson, Thomas • Johnson, Lyndon • Johnson, Samuel • Kennedy, John F. • King, Martin Luther • La Rochefoucauld, Francois • Lewis, C.S. • Lincoln, Abraham • Mencken, H.L. • Orwell, George • Pratchett, Terry • Roosevelt, Eleanor • Roosevelt, Theodore • Russell, Bertrand • Seneca the Younger • Shakespeare, William • Shaw, George Bernard • Stevenson, Adlai • Stevenson, Robert Louis • Twain, Mark • Watterson, Bill • Wilde, Oscar- Only the 45 most quoted authors are shown above. Full author list.
Recent Feedback
- 24-Jul-20 - Italian proverb | WIST on Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales [Maxims], # 89 (1665-1678).
- 6-Jul-20 - (Attributed) | WIST on Quoted in Plutarch, Parallel Lives, “The Life of Solon,” sec. 18.5 [tr. Perrin (1914)].
- 6-Jul-20 - Agamemnon, l. 928 | WIST on Oedipus Rex, l. 1529 (concluding words).
- 20-May-20 - Introduction to the Art of Thinking, ch. 1, "Friendship" (1761) | WIST on John 15:13 (KJV).
- 18-May-20 - Chamblee54 on Clouds, ll. 998-999 (423 BC) [tr. Athenian Soc. (1912)].
- 18-May-20 - Chamblee54 on Mills E. Godwin, Governor of Virginia (Dec 1966).
Quotations by MacLeish, Archibald
There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream.
Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) American poet, writer, statesman
“We Have Purpose … We All Know It,” Life (30 May 1960)
Part of a series of essays in Life and The New York Times on "The National Purpose."
To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue 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 eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers.
Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) American poet, writer, statesman
NY Times (25 Dec 1968)
On the "Earth rising over the Moon" photo sent back from an Apollo mission. When collected in "Bubble of Blue Air," Riders on the Earth; Essays and Recollections, epigraph (1978), he phrased it: "To see the earth as we now see it, small and blue 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."
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 (1892–1982) American poet, writer, statesman
In Charles Poore, “Mr. MacLeish and the Disenchantmentarians,” The New York Times (25 Jan 1968)
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