Quote

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.

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
Purpose
Village
Thug
Human
Idiot
Potentially
Humans
Rational
Mechanical
People
Deeds
Scarcely
Instruments
Enable
Million
Purposes
Blessing
Gossip
Millions
Vehicle
Broadcast

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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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The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.
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Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training...
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Without leisure there can be neither art nor science nor fine conversation, nor any ceremonious performance of the offices of love and friendship.
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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.
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For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old.
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The final goal of human effort is man's self-transforma tion.
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Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
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Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further development.
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This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid.
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The artist has a special task and duty... reminding people of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.
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The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.
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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.
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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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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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The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.
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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.
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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.
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Order and creativity are complementary.
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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.
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