Time & Perspective Quote by Archibald MacLeish

MacLeish is warning that the most dangerous assaults on a free society rarely arrive wearing jackboots; they show up as moral certainty. The phrase "those who are convinced of their own superior rightness" skewers a perennial temptation among elites and activists alike: the belief that your cause is so pure it no longer needs to persuade. He doesn’t waste time on the censors’ arguments because that’s the point - censorship is what happens when argument feels optional.

The line is built like a trapdoor. It begins with a seemingly modest concession: "Once you permit..". Not "once they seize", but once you allow. Responsibility shifts from the loud suppressors to the passive public, the institutions that go along, the well-meaning allies who tell themselves it’s just one deplatforming, one blacklist, one banned book. "Censor and silence and suppress" is a purposeful pile-on, a triplet that mimics escalation: first you edit, then you muzzle, then you erase.

"Just at that moment" sharpens the moral timing. MacLeish isn’t saying suppression will eventually corrode the republic; he’s saying the corrosion is the surrender. The "citadel" metaphor matters coming from a 20th-century American poet who lived through fascism abroad and the chill of McCarthyism at home (and who, as Librarian of Congress, understood how power polices culture). The subtext is bleakly democratic: liberty doesn’t die only from enemies. It dies when its defenders decide they’re too right to listen.