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New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.

Lewis Mumford

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.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Diversity Ideas Justice
Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Birth Growth Immortality
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 MUMFORD

Art Life Practice
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 MUMFORD

Focus Past Provoking Thought
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.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Creativity Men Order
For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Accepting Mean Progress
To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Art Machines Opportunity
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.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Cell Heaven Needs
Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Architecture Prophecy Tomb
Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Aggravation Life Sacred
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.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Adventure Justified Should
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

Country Men People Safety
Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Funny Humor Inspirational
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.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Government Real Thinking
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Flower Funny Witty
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.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Artist Expression Science

New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.

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New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.

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