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

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

More quotes by Lewis Mumford

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War is both the product of an earlier corruption, and a producer of new corruptions.
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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 chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.
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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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In our entrancement with the motorcar, we have forgotten how much more efficient and how much more flexible the footwalker is.
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The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
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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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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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War is a specific product of civilization.
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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.
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New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
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Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
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By putting business before every other manifestation of life, our mechanical and financial civilization has forgotten the chief business of life: namely, growth, reproduction, development. It pays infinite attention to the incubator-and it forgets the egg!
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Neither democracy nor effective representation is possible until each participant in the group...devotes a measurable part of his life to furthering its existence.
Lewis Mumford
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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.
Lewis Mumford
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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.
Lewis Mumford
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A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.
Lewis Mumford
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Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
Lewis Mumford
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The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.
Lewis Mumford
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The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.
Lewis Mumford