Quote

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.

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
Time
Necessarily
Destruction
Culminating
Progress
Accompanied
Movement
Usage
Space
Limitless
Energy
Vulgar
Come
Equally
Mean
Command

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The convenience of timekeeping is greatly overrated and the people who practice it so faithfully that they lose the capacity for appreciating the fixed and the static and the spatially related experiences cut themselves off from a good part of reality.
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Faith in the creative process, in the dynamics of emergence, in the values and purposes that transcend past achievements and past forms, is the precondition of all further growth.
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War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.
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Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.
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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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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 cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
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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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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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If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.
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The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.
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War is a specific product of civilization.
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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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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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Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.
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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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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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Order and creativity are complementary.
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The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.
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