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What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.
Archibald Macleish
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Freedom involves having the ability to make choices that shape one's own life.

In this quote, Archibald Macleish emphasizes that true freedom is not merely the absence of constraints, but the empowerment to make choices that define one's existence. It underscores the importance of having options and the autonomy to decide between those options, illustrating how personal agency is fundamental to the concept of freedom.

Themes

FreedomChoiceAutonomyAgencyAlternatives

In practice

Example use cases

In a speech about civil rights, one might quote this to highlight the importance of choice in a free society.

More from Archibald Macleish

A poem should not mean but be.
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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.
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Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
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How shall freedom be defended? By arms when it is attacked by arms, by truth when it is attacked by lies, by faith when it is attacked by authoritarian dogma. Always, in the final act, by determination and faith.
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Races didn't bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world.
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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.
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