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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
Progress
Means
Mean
Discarding
Americans
Accepting

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Don't take the will for the deed get the deed.
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The self holds both a hell and a heaven.
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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.
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Geneva has the sleepy tidiness of a man who combs his hair while yet in his pyjamas.
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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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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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Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
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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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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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In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.
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Chaos, if it does not harden into a pattern of disorder, may be more fruitful than a regularity too easily accepted and a success too easily achieved.
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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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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.
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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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Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.
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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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Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.
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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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Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.
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A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.
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