Quote

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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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
Good
Appreciate
Faithfully
Time
Capacity
Overrated
People
Cutting
Static
Lose
Convenience
Loses
Greatly
Practice
Related
Reality
Fixed
Spatially
Part
Experiences
Appreciating

More quotes by 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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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.
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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.
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The self holds both a hell and a heaven.
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Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
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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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Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
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Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
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Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.
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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.
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War is a specific product of civilization.
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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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War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.
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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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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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