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

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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?
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Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.
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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.
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The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.
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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.
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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.
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War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
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Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.
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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.
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This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid.
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.
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Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
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.
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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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Every work of art is an abstraction from time it denies the reality of change and decay and death.
Lewis Mumford
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The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.
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Only when love takes the lead will the earth, and life on earth, be safe again. And not until then.
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.
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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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In our entrancement with the motorcar, we have forgotten how much more efficient and how much more flexible the footwalker is.
Lewis Mumford