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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.
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
Economic
Burdens
Class
Inequality
Society
Classes
Opportunity
Leisure
Spiritual
Opportunities
Another
Burden
Giving
Labor
Dooms
Work
Gives
Sterility
More quotes by Lewis Mumford
Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.We effectively became time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers with the invention of the clock.
Lewis Mumford
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.
Lewis Mumford
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...
Lewis Mumford
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
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
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.
Lewis Mumford
A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.
Lewis Mumford
It was Stieglitz's endeavor... to translate the unseen world of tactile values as they develop between lovers not merely into the sexual act but the entire relation of two personalities - to translate this world of blind touch into sight.
Lewis Mumford
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
Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.
Lewis Mumford
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
The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.
Lewis Mumford
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.
Lewis Mumford
The self holds both a hell and a heaven.
Lewis Mumford
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
If there are favourable habitats and favorable forms of association for animalsand plants, as ecology demonstrates, why not for men? If each particular natural environment has has its own balance is there not perhaps an equivalent of this in culture?
Lewis Mumford
The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
Lewis Mumford
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
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.
Lewis Mumford
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
