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Neither democracy nor effective representation is possible until each participant in the group...devotes a measurable part of his life to furthering its existence.

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
Neither
Devotes
Groups
Measurable
Democracy
Participant
Existence
Participants
Possible
Citizenship
Part
Representation
Life
Effective
Group
Furthering

More quotes by Lewis Mumford

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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
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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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The fact that order and creativity are complementary has been basic to man's cultural development for he has to internalize order to be able to give external form to his creativity.
Lewis Mumford
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Don't take the will for the deed get the deed.
Lewis Mumford
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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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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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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.
Lewis Mumford
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War is both the product of an earlier corruption, and a producer of new corruptions.
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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For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old.
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.
Lewis Mumford
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Faith in the creative process, in the dynamics of emergence, in the values and purposes that transcend past achievements and past forms, is the precondition of all further growth.
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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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
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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.
Lewis Mumford
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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.
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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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
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If we never met again in our lives I should feel that somehow the whole adventure of existence was justified by my having met you.
Lewis Mumford
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Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.
Lewis Mumford