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 MUMFORDEvery work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.
More Lewis Mumford Quotes
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Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
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Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.
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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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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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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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New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
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Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
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In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
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 -
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 -
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.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
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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Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
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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.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
The self holds both a hell and a heaven.
LEWIS MUMFORD