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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.

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
Mean
Discarding
Americans
Accepting
Progress
Means

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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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In our entrancement with the motorcar, we have forgotten how much more efficient and how much more flexible the footwalker is.
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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.
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The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.
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Every work of art is an abstraction from time it denies the reality of change and decay and death.
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Order and creativity are complementary.
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It was Stieglitz's endeavor... to translate the unseen world of tactile values as they develop between lovers not merely into the sexual act but the entire relation of two personalities - to translate this world of blind touch into sight.
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War is a specific product of civilization.
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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 cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
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Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.
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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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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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Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.
Lewis Mumford