Lewis Mumford Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.”
-- Lewis MumfordSource : Lewis Mumford (1928). “The Story of Utopias”, p.8, Library of Alexandria
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“A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
“The last step in parental love involves the release of the beloved; the willing cutting of the cord that would otherwise keep the child in a state of emotional dependence.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
“Life is an art we are required to practice without preparation, a score that we play at sight even before we have mastered our instruments.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
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“A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
“Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.”
-- Lewis MumfordSource : "The Conduct Of Life". Book by Lewis Mumford, 1951.
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“Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.”
-- Lewis MumfordSource : Quote Magazine 8 Oct. 1961
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“Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
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“A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
“The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
“The fact that order and creativity are complementary has been basic to man's cultural development; for he has to internalize order to be able to give external form to his creativity.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
“Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
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“Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
“Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
“Virtue is not a chemical product... it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
“Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further development.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
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“Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal." Even more unfortunately, the industries that are favored by such expansion must, to maintain their output, be devoted to goods that are readily consumable either by their nature, or because they are so shoddily fabricated that they must soon be replaced. By fashion and built-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
“However far modern science and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson; nothing is impossible.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
“Don't take the will for the deed; get the deed.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
“Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
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“Genuine [economic] value lies in the power to sustain or enrich life”
-- Lewis Mumford -
“We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
“One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
“The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.”
-- Lewis MumfordSource : "The City in History". Book by Lewis Mumford. Chapter 18, 1961.
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“Each one of us, as long as life stirs is us, may play a part in extricating ourselves from the power system by asserting our primacy as people in quiet acts of mental or physical withdrawal-in gestures of non-conformity, in abstentions, restrictions, inhibitions, which will liberate us from the domination of the pentagon of power.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
“To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
“A Society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure and to another all the burdens of work condemns both classes to spiritual sterility.”
-- Lewis MumfordSource : "Faith for Living". Book by Lewis Mumford, 1940.
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“Integration proceeds by just the opposite route: a deliberate heightening of every organic function; a release of impulses from circumstances that irrationally thwarted them; richer and more complex patterns of activity; an esthetic heightening of anticipated realizations; a steady lengthening of the future; a faith in cosmic perspectives.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
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“New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.”
-- Lewis Mumford -
“What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself”
-- Lewis Mumford
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