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Every work of art is an abstraction from time it denies the reality of change and decay and death.

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
Deny
Death
Art
Reality
Change
Work
Denies
Every
Abstraction
Time
Decay

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War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.
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Don't take the will for the deed get the deed.
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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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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 very people who shudder over the cruelty of the hunter are apt to forget that slaughter, in the grimmest sense of the word, is a process they entrust daily to the butcher and that unlike the game of the forests, even the dumbest creatures of the slaughterhouse know what is in store for them.
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New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
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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.
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The final goal of human effort is man's self-transforma tion.
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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!
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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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War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
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The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
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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 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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He who touches the soil of Manhattan and the pavement of New York, touches, whenever he knows or not, Walt Whitman.
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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.
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In our entrancement with the motorcar, we have forgotten how much more efficient and how much more flexible the footwalker is.
Lewis Mumford
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The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.
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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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One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.
Lewis Mumford