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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

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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
Efficient
Forgotten
Much
Motorcar
Flexible

More quotes by Lewis Mumford

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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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A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.
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By putting business before every other manifestation of life, our mechanical and financial civilization has forgotten the chief business of life: namely, growth, reproduction, development. It pays infinite attention to the incubator-and it forgets the egg!
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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 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 ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.
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Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.
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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.
Lewis Mumford
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Man's Chief purpose is the creation and preservation of values that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life.
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Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.
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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 cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
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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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War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
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War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.
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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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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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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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Order and creativity are complementary.
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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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