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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.

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

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Order and creativity are complementary.
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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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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 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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The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
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The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.
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Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
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The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.
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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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Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
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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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War is both the product of an earlier corruption, and a producer of new corruptions.
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Neither democracy nor effective representation is possible until each participant in the group...devotes a measurable part of his life to furthering its existence.
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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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Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.
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Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.We effectively became time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers with the invention of the clock.
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War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.
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As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used - as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts - to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera.
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A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.
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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.
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