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

More quotes by Lewis Mumford

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The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.
Lewis Mumford
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He who touches the soil of Manhattan and the pavement of New York, touches, whenever he knows or not, Walt Whitman.
Lewis Mumford
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Without leisure there can be neither art nor science nor fine conversation, nor any ceremonious performance of the offices of love and friendship.
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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Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.
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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A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility.
Lewis Mumford
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When art seems to be empty of meaning, as no doubt some of the abstract painting of our own day actually does seem, what the painting says, indeed what the artist is shrieking at the top of his voice, is that life has become empty of all rational content and coherence, and that, in times like these, is far from a meaningless statement.
Lewis Mumford
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Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
Lewis Mumford
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Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.
Lewis Mumford
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The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.
Lewis Mumford
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As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used - as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts - to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera.
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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The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.
Lewis Mumford
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The convenience of timekeeping is greatly overrated and the people who practice it so faithfully that they lose the capacity for appreciating the fixed and the static and the spatially related experiences cut themselves off from a good part of reality.
Lewis Mumford
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If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.
Lewis Mumford
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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.
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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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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By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.
Lewis Mumford