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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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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
Spiritual
Machine
Culture
Machines
Running
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Materials
Made
Physical
Displacement
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Perhaps
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Environment
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Less
Vast
More quotes by Lewis Mumford
In its revolt against congestion and sordor, a space-hungry generation has, I fear, developed eyes that are bigger than its stomach.
Lewis Mumford
Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.
Lewis Mumford
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
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
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
The final goal of human effort is man's self-transforma tion.
Lewis Mumford
War is a specific product of civilization.
Lewis Mumford
A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.
Lewis Mumford
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
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
By putting business before every other manifestation of life, our mechanical and financial civilization has forgotten the chief business of life: namely, growth, reproduction, development. It pays infinite attention to the incubator-and it forgets the egg!
Lewis Mumford
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
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
War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
Lewis Mumford
For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old.
Lewis Mumford
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
He who touches the soil of Manhattan and the pavement of New York, touches, whenever he knows or not, Walt Whitman.
Lewis Mumford
The earth is the Lord's fullness thereof: this is no longer a hollow dictum of religion, but a directive for economic action toward human brotherhood.
Lewis Mumford
This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid.
Lewis Mumford
The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
Lewis Mumford
