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The fact that order and creativity are complementary has been basic to man's cultural development for he has to internalize order to be able to give external form to his creativity.

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
Fact
Facts
Internalize
Order
Complementary
Form
External
Give
Cultural
Able
Basic
Giving
Creativity
Men
Development

More quotes by 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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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.
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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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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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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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Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
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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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
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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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Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.
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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 self holds both a hell and a heaven.
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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Order and creativity are complementary.
Lewis Mumford
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A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.
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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Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.
Lewis Mumford
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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.
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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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