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In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.

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
Peace
Consumer
War
Producer
Consumers
Producers
Army
Merely
Negative
Pure
Antiwar

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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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For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old.
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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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Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
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The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
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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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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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Chaos, if it does not harden into a pattern of disorder, may be more fruitful than a regularity too easily accepted and a success too easily achieved.
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The final goal of human effort is man's self-transforma tion.
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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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A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.
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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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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.
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Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.
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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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The artist has a special task and duty... reminding people of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.
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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.
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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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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!
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A picture was once a rare sort of symbol, rare enough to call for attentive concentration. Now it is the actual experience that is rare, and the picture has become ubiquitous.
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