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Deliberately, on every historic occasion, we piously fake events for the benefit of photographers, while the actual event often occurs in a different fashion and we have the effrontery to call these artful dress rehearsals authentic historic documents.

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
Different
Dress
Occasion
Piously
Every
Dresses
Documents
Artful
Photographer
Authentic
Rehearsals
Benefits
Occasions
Photographers
Events
Fake
Deliberately
Fashion
Event
Rehearsal
Call
Actual
Occurs
Often
Benefit
Historic
Effrontery

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The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.
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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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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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The very people who shudder over the cruelty of the hunter are apt to forget that slaughter, in the grimmest sense of the word, is a process they entrust daily to the butcher and that unlike the game of the forests, even the dumbest creatures of the slaughterhouse know what is in store for them.
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Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
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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.
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Faith in the creative process, in the dynamics of emergence, in the values and purposes that transcend past achievements and past forms, is the precondition of all further growth.
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If there are favourable habitats and favorable forms of association for animalsand plants, as ecology demonstrates, why not for men? If each particular natural environment has has its own balance is there not perhaps an equivalent of this in culture?
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Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.
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Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
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In its revolt against congestion and sordor, a space-hungry generation has, I fear, developed eyes that are bigger than its stomach.
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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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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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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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Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
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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.
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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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One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.
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A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.
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