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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 both the product of an earlier corruption, and a producer of new corruptions.
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The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.
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War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.
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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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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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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.
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In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.
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The final goal of human effort is man's self-transforma tion.
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The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion.
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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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Order and creativity are complementary.
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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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Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.
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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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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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Only when love takes the lead will the earth, and life on earth, be safe again. And not until then.
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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 self holds both a hell and a heaven.
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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.
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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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