Quote

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
Spiritual
Opportunities
Another
Burden
Giving
Labor
Dooms
Work
Gives
Sterility
Economic
Burdens
Class
Inequality
Society
Classes
Opportunity
Leisure

More quotes by Lewis Mumford

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This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid.
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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.
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Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
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In its revolt against congestion and sordor, a space-hungry generation has, I fear, developed eyes that are bigger than its stomach.
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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 cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
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The last step in parental love involves the release of the beloved the willing cutting of the cord that would otherwise keep the child in a state of emotional dependence.
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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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We have lost faith in the formal powers of the mind, not, as some suppose, because our universe is too difficult to grasp, but because we lack the inner principle of order.
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The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.
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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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The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.
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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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A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.
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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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Man's Chief purpose is the creation and preservation of values that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life.
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Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.
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War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.
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The final goal of human effort is man's self-transforma tion.
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Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.
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