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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.

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
Today
Line
Without
Perhaps
Single
Progress
Century
Parochial
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Limit
Goal
Notion
Seems
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War is a specific product of civilization.
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War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
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The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.
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The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
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Deliberately, on every historic occasion, we piously fake events for the benefit of photographers, while the actual event often occurs in a different fashion and we have the effrontery to call these artful dress rehearsals authentic historic documents.
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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.
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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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A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.
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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.
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When cities were first founded, an old Egyptian scribe tells us, the mission of the founder was to 'put gods in their shrines.' The task of the coming city is not essentially different: its mission is to put the highest concerns of man at the center of all his activities.
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Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act.
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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.
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War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.
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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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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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Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
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Order and creativity are complementary.
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War is both the product of an earlier corruption, and a producer of new corruptions.
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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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When art seems to be empty of meaning, as no doubt some of the abstract painting of our own day actually does seem, what the painting says, indeed what the artist is shrieking at the top of his voice, is that life has become empty of all rational content and coherence, and that, in times like these, is far from a meaningless statement.
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