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

More quotes by Lewis Mumford

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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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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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War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.
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Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.
Lewis Mumford
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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
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New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
Lewis Mumford
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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.
Lewis Mumford
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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.
Lewis Mumford
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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
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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
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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
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War is both the product of an earlier corruption, and a producer of new corruptions.
Lewis Mumford
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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
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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
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The convenience of timekeeping is greatly overrated and the people who practice it so faithfully that they lose the capacity for appreciating the fixed and the static and the spatially related experiences cut themselves off from a good part of reality.
Lewis Mumford
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Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
Lewis Mumford
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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
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Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
Lewis Mumford
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A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.
Lewis Mumford
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Order and creativity are complementary.
Lewis Mumford