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…
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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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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Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.
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In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.
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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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Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
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New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
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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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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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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 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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Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
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The self holds both a hell and a heaven.
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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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To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.
LEWIS MUMFORD