Quote

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.

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
Symbols
Actual
Picture
Sort
Ubiquitous
Call
Attentive
Experience
Symbol
Become
Concentration
Enough
Rare

More quotes by Lewis Mumford

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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.
Lewis Mumford
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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.
Lewis Mumford
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Order and creativity are complementary.
Lewis Mumford
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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.
Lewis Mumford
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Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.
Lewis Mumford
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The self holds both a hell and a heaven.
Lewis Mumford
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Happiness, I think, lies on the surface... when one plunges under the surface all the buoyant things disappear, and the farther down one gets the more cold and dark it seems: and the more oppressive space feels.
Lewis Mumford
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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.
Lewis Mumford
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The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.
Lewis Mumford
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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.
Lewis Mumford
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The artist has a special task and duty... reminding people of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.
Lewis Mumford
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The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.
Lewis Mumford
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The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.
Lewis Mumford
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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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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.
Lewis Mumford
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The last step in parental love involves the release of the beloved the willing cutting of the cord that would otherwise keep the child in a state of emotional dependence.
Lewis Mumford
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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.
Lewis Mumford
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I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!
Lewis Mumford
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Idealism and science continue to function in separate compartments and yet 'the happiness of man on earth' depends upon their combination.
Lewis Mumford
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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.
Lewis Mumford