Louis MacNeice Quotes
Democracy - or any improvement on it - will rest on the layman's right to criticize. His criticism will be often - very often - damn silly, but if, like Plato and the Fascists, we take away his right to criticize, we take away his right to appreciate.
MacNeice, Louis. Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay. Oxford University Press, 1938.
Many of the fundamental principles of government that were in the United States Constitution, were already in the Constitutions of different states. Vermont had a substantial number of them. When we speak of the Constitution as a “revolutionary document” it was to the rest of the world but not to many Americans who had these concepts in their state constitutions and had been living with them for some time.
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He was countering the argument of unlimited free speech advocates that fascist hate speech should not be countered by more speech on teh other side. Historically, he observed, that Fascism has only been defeated by force and control.
Frederick Louis MacNeice CBE was an Irish poet and playwright from Northern Ireland, and a member of the Auden Group, which also included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. MacNeice's body of work was widely appreciated by the public during his lifetime, due in part to his relaxed but socially and emotionally aware style. Never as overtly or simplistically political as some of his contemporaries, he expressed a humane opposition to totalitarianism as well as an acute awareness of his roots.
