Quote

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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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
Would
Knew
Assessment
Men
Written
Aging
Came
Absolutes
Dies
Absolute
Happy
Pass
Reluctantly
Words
None
Predicted
Ever
Personality
Tombstone
Things
Fool
Disastrous

More quotes by Lewis Mumford

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Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
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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 timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.
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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 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.
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In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.
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Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.
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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.
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Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
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A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.
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Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
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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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The artist has a special task and duty... reminding people of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.
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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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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 great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.
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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.
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New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
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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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In vulgar usage, progress has come to mean limitless movement in space and time, accompanied, necessarily, by an equally limitless command of energy: culminating in limitless destruction.
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