Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.
LEWIS MUMFORDFor most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old.
More Lewis Mumford Quotes
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The self holds both a hell and a heaven.
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Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
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New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.
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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.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
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 -
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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Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
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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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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 -
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 -
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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Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
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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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In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.
LEWIS MUMFORD