"Religion is at its best when it makes us ask hard questions of ourselves. It is at its worst when it deludes us into thinking we have all the answers for everybody else."

Archibald MacLeish Literature See all quotes by Archibald MacLeish →

React to this quote

More by Archibald MacLeish

“If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God.”

“The Paris Review interview series”

“It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.”

“Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.”

“Archibald MacLeish's Grave”

“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.”

Resonant Thoughts

"We need to be thinking about: How do we allow people to ascend the ladder of opportunity, rather than how do we give them everything and keep them dependent."

— Ben Carson

Politics1951

#mind

"The Chinese enjoyed the spectacle of death, Jim had decided, as a way of reminding themselves of how precariously they were alive. They liked to be cruel for the same reason, to remind themselves of t…"

— J. G. Ballard

Literature1930–2009

#mind

"What is very important to me is two points: A theory should be internally consistent and it should have some contact with observation. Well, I’m told by all the experts that this theory is internally …"

— Valentine Telegdi

Science1922–2006

#mind