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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 the training...

Lewis Mumford

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Lewis Mumford
Age: 94 †
Born: 1895
Born: October 19
Died: 1990
Died: January 26
Architect
Architectural Theoretician
Historian
Historian Of Technology
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Flushing
Long Island
Essential
Essentials
Training
Preliminary
Practice
Failures
Art
Required
Without
Trials
Life
Preparation
Allowed

More quotes by Lewis Mumford

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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
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Every transformation of humanity has rested upon deep stirrings and intuitions, whose rationalized expression takes the form of a new picture of the cosmos and the nature of the human.
Lewis Mumford
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Deliberately, on every historic occasion, we piously fake events for the benefit of photographers, while the actual event often occurs in a different fashion and we have the effrontery to call these artful dress rehearsals authentic historic documents.
Lewis Mumford
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If we never met again in our lives I should feel that somehow the whole adventure of existence was justified by my having met you.
Lewis Mumford
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The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.
Lewis Mumford
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Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act.
Lewis Mumford
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War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
Lewis Mumford
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The very people who shudder over the cruelty of the hunter are apt to forget that slaughter, in the grimmest sense of the word, is a process they entrust daily to the butcher and that unlike the game of the forests, even the dumbest creatures of the slaughterhouse know what is in store for them.
Lewis Mumford
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One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.
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
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Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day.
Lewis Mumford
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It was Stieglitz's endeavor... to translate the unseen world of tactile values as they develop between lovers not merely into the sexual act but the entire relation of two personalities - to translate this world of blind touch into sight.
Lewis Mumford
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Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.We effectively became time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers with the invention of the clock.
Lewis Mumford
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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
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Because of their origin and purpose, the meanings of art are of a different order from the operational meanings of science and technics: they relate, not to external means and consequences, but to internal transformations, and unless it produce these internal transformations the work of art is either perfunctory or dead.
Lewis Mumford
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Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.
Lewis Mumford
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The artist does not illustrate science ... [but] he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does, and expresses by a visual synthesis what the scientist converts into analytical formulae or experimental demonstrations.
Lewis Mumford
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Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.
Lewis Mumford
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Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.
Lewis Mumford
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In its revolt against congestion and sordor, a space-hungry generation has, I fear, developed eyes that are bigger than its stomach.
Lewis Mumford