A poem should not mean but be.
Archibald MacleishRead
What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.
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
All quotes βTo 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
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.
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
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A man cannot become an atheist merely by wishing it.
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Philosophy dwells aloft in the Temple of Science, the divinity of its inmost shrine; her dictates descend among men, but she herself descends not : whoso would behold her must climb with long and laborious effort, nay, still linger in the forecourt, till manifold trial have proved him worthy of admission into the interior solemnities.
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Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.
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There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by God, and counterclaimed by Satan.
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