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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
Instruments
Enable
Million
Purposes
Blessing
Gossip
Millions
Vehicle
Broadcast
Purpose
Village
Thug
Human
Idiot
Potentially
Humans
Rational
Mechanical
People
Deeds
Scarcely
More quotes by Lewis Mumford
In our entrancement with the motorcar, we have forgotten how much more efficient and how much more flexible the footwalker is.
Lewis Mumford
War is both the product of an earlier corruption, and a producer of new corruptions.
Lewis Mumford
A picture was once a rare sort of symbol, rare enough to call for attentive concentration. Now it is the actual experience that is rare, and the picture has become ubiquitous.
Lewis Mumford
A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility.
Lewis Mumford
Without leisure there can be neither art nor science nor fine conversation, nor any ceremonious performance of the offices of love and friendship.
Lewis Mumford
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
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
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
Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
Lewis Mumford
Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.
Lewis Mumford
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
Deliberately, on every historic occasion, we piously fake events for the benefit of photographers, while the actual event often occurs in a different fashion and we have the effrontery to call these artful dress rehearsals authentic historic documents.
Lewis Mumford
This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid.
Lewis Mumford
The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans.
Lewis Mumford
A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.
Lewis Mumford
War is a specific product of civilization.
Lewis Mumford
One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.
Lewis Mumford
I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!
Lewis Mumford
The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.
Lewis Mumford
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.
Lewis Mumford
