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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
Flexible
Efficient
Forgotten
Much
Motorcar

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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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Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
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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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Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day.
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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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This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid.
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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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Don't take the will for the deed get the deed.
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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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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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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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When art seems to be empty of meaning, as no doubt some of the abstract painting of our own day actually does seem, what the painting says, indeed what the artist is shrieking at the top of his voice, is that life has become empty of all rational content and coherence, and that, in times like these, is far from a meaningless statement.
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The self holds both a hell and a heaven.
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The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.
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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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War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.
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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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Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
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The final goal of human effort is man's self-transforma tion.
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