A poem should not mean but be.
Archibald MacleishRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the uniqueness and unity of American identity beyond racial distinctions.
Archibald Macleish reflects on the essence of American identity, suggesting that the people of America transcended the concept of races by forming a collective identity as 'a People'. This perspective celebrates the idea of self-definition and unity in diversity, marking a significant philosophical shift in how we understand individual and collective identity in the context of national belonging.
Themes
IdentityUnityDiversityPeopleAmerica
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a graduation speech to emphasize the importance of unity among diverse individuals.
More from Archibald Macleish
All quotes →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.
Archibald MacleishRead
Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
Archibald MacleishRead
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.
Archibald MacleishRead
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.
Archibald MacleishRead
Never in all their history have men been able truly to conceive of the world as one: a single sphere, a globe, having the qualities of a globe, a round earth in which all the directions eventually meet, in which there is no center because every point, or none, is center - an equal earth which all men occupy as equals. The airman's earth, if free men make it, will be truly round: a globe in practice, not in theory.
Archibald MacleishRead
Similar quotes
This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.
George OrwellRead
Who knows whether, if I had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt that bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one's own latent greatness
Italo SvevoRead
Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species - us.
Daniel DennettRead
The letter kills the spirit. The written text is mute in the face of responding challenge. It does not admit of inward growth and correction. Text subverts the absolutely vital role of memory.
George SteinerRead
It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.
Charlotte Perkins GilmanRead
Man may be defined as the animal that can say ''I,'' that can be aware of himself as a separate entity.
Erich FrommRead