Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
May
Disorder
Achieved
Patterns
Chaos
Accepted
Harden
Easily
Regularity
Success
Fruitful
Doe
Pattern

More quotes by Lewis Mumford

Image
The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.
Lewis Mumford
Image
Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
Lewis Mumford
Image
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
Image
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.
Lewis Mumford
Image
One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.
Lewis Mumford
Image
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.
Lewis Mumford
Image
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.
Lewis Mumford
Image
New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
Lewis Mumford
Image
The final goal of human effort is man's self-transforma tion.
Lewis Mumford
Image
War is a specific product of civilization.
Lewis Mumford
Image
The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans.
Lewis Mumford
Image
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
Image
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
Image
In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.
Lewis Mumford
Image
Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.
Lewis Mumford
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.
Lewis Mumford
Image
The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.
Lewis Mumford
Image
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.
Lewis Mumford