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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
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Historian
Historian Of Technology
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
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Flushing
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The self holds both a hell and a heaven.
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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.
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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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Don't take the will for the deed get the deed.
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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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War is both the product of an earlier corruption, and a producer of new corruptions.
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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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The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
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Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.We effectively became time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers with the invention of the clock.
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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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Every work of art is an abstraction from time it denies the reality of change and decay and death.
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Only when love takes the lead will the earth, and life on earth, be safe again. And not until then.
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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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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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Chaos, if it does not harden into a pattern of disorder, may be more fruitful than a regularity too easily accepted and a success too easily achieved.
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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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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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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.
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Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.
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Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
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