Time & Perspective Quote by Archibald MacLeish

Dissent, in MacLeish's hands, isn’t a heroic identity or a permanent costume. It’s a flicker of private clarity: the moment you step out of the “herd” long enough to notice you’ve been moving with it. The line is built to puncture the romance of the lone rebel. Instead of flattering dissidents as a special breed, MacLeish democratizes the act of resistance - and, slyly, makes it harder to outsource courage to a few brave souls. If dissent is “every human being” at certain moments, then conformity is the default setting, not the villainous choice of other people.

The verb choice matters. You don’t escape the herd; you “resign” from it, like a temporary job. That framing carries subtext about modern social life: belonging isn’t just instinctual, it’s structured, almost bureaucratic. And “momentarily” is the sting. Independent thought is fragile, brief, and easily reabsorbed into group comfort. MacLeish isn’t celebrating a stable, enlightened self; he’s describing a recurring struggle between social safety and intellectual honesty.

Context helps explain the urgency. MacLeish lived through two world wars, the rise of mass propaganda, and the mid-century American pressures to declare loyalty in public and silence in private. As a poet who also worked in government and cultural institutions, he understood how consensus gets manufactured - and how easily language becomes a crowd-control device. The sentence is a miniature manifesto for civic adulthood: dissent begins not in the streets, but in the mind, at the exact point where you stop letting the group think on your behalf.