Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.
LEWIS MUMFORDIn war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.
More Lewis Mumford Quotes
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New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
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Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.
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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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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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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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Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
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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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To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.
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Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
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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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Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training…
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The fact that order and creativity are complementary has been basic to man’s cultural development; for he has to internalize order to be able to give external form to his creativity.
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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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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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Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
LEWIS MUMFORD