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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 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
Matter
Cities
Biological
Living
Chief
Energy
Chiefs
Culture
Symbols
Social
Function
Art
City
Form
Creativity
Convert
Power
Dead
Reproduction

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Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.
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War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
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Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
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In our entrancement with the motorcar, we have forgotten how much more efficient and how much more flexible the footwalker is.
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Man's Chief purpose is the creation and preservation of values that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life.
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Only when love takes the lead will the earth, and life on earth, be safe again. And not until then.
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The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
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Every work of art is an abstraction from time it denies the reality of change and decay and death.
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Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
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Idealism and science continue to function in separate compartments and yet 'the happiness of man on earth' depends upon their combination.
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New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
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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.
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The self holds both a hell and a heaven.
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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.
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I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!
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The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.
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The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans.
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The artist has a special task and duty... reminding people of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.
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This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid.
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Faith in the creative process, in the dynamics of emergence, in the values and purposes that transcend past achievements and past forms, is the precondition of all further growth.
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