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

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The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.
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The earth is the Lord's fullness thereof: this is no longer a hollow dictum of religion, but a directive for economic action toward human brotherhood.
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Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
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The artist does not illustrate science ... [but] he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does, and expresses by a visual synthesis what the scientist converts into analytical formulae or experimental demonstrations.
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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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We have lost faith in the formal powers of the mind, not, as some suppose, because our universe is too difficult to grasp, but because we lack the inner principle of order.
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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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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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Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
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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.
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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!
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War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.
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If we never met again in our lives I should feel that somehow the whole adventure of existence was justified by my having met you.
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Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
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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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Every work of art is an abstraction from time it denies the reality of change and decay and death.
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The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.
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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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Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.
Lewis Mumford