Each person is a temporary focus of forces, vitalities, and values that carry back to an immemorial past and that reach forward into an unthinkable future.
LEWIS MUMFORDSafety 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.
More Lewis Mumford Quotes
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The self holds both a hell and a heaven.
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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 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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Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.
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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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Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
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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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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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Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.
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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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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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In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.
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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.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.
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Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
LEWIS MUMFORD