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

More quotes by Lewis Mumford

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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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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
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War is a specific product of civilization.
Lewis Mumford
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War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
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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Every transformation of humanity has rested upon deep stirrings and intuitions, whose rationalized expression takes the form of a new picture of the cosmos and the nature of the human.
Lewis Mumford
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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.
Lewis Mumford
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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 cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
Lewis Mumford
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New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
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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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Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.
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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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.
Lewis Mumford
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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.
Lewis Mumford
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The artist has a special task and duty... reminding people of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.
Lewis Mumford
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Order and creativity are complementary.
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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By fashion and built-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale.
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