Quote of the Day (Archibald MacLeish, on Hate and the Threat to ‘The American Idea’)

“America cannot survive if the American idea is repudiated. Nations are not made by territory, or the greatness of nations by extent of land. Nations are made by commitments of mind and loyalties of heart, and the nobler the commitment of the mind, the higher the loyalty of the heart, the greater the nation. If the American proposition is no longer the proposition to which the American heart and mind were committed at our beginning, then America is finished, and the only question left is when America will fall.”—American poet-statesman Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), “Must We Hate?”, The Atlantic, February 1963