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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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Lewis Mumford
Age: 94 †
Born: 1895
Born: October 19
Died: 1990
Died: January 26
Architect
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Journalist
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More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.
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Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.
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Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
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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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Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
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Don't take the will for the deed get the deed.
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Happiness, I think, lies on the surface... when one plunges under the surface all the buoyant things disappear, and the farther down one gets the more cold and dark it seems: and the more oppressive space feels.
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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...
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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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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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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!
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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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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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.
Lewis Mumford
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New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
Lewis Mumford
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Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
Lewis Mumford
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War is both the product of an earlier corruption, and a producer of new corruptions.
Lewis Mumford