Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.
LEWIS MUMFORDIf we never met again in our lives I should feel that somehow the whole adventure of existence was justified by my having met you.
More Lewis Mumford Quotes
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Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.
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Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
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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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To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.
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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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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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Safety razors make it hard to grow beards in America: America would be a better place if there were a few bearded, savage, terrible old men.
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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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Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
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New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
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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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Henceforward, I shout to the heavens, I shall deliver no more lectures on behalf of good causes: I am the good cause that denies the need for such lectures. Avaunt, importuning world! Back to my cell.
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The self holds both a hell and a heaven.
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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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Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
LEWIS MUMFORD