Lewis Mumford Quotes - Page 5

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• Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.

  Lewis Mumford

  Meaningful, Spiritual, Revenge

  "The Conduct Of Life" by Lewis Mumford, Ch. 1, 1951.

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• Happiness, I think, lies on the surface... when one plunges under the surface all the buoyant things disappear, and the farther down one gets the more cold and dark it seems: and the more oppressive space feels.

  Lewis Mumford

  Happiness, Lying, Dark

  Lewis Mumford (1979). “My works and days: a personal chronicle”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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• Stieglitz conceived, though he never carried out, a series of photographs of the heads of stallions and mares, of bulls and cows, in the act of mating, hoping to catch in the brute an essential quality that would symbolize the probably unattainable photograph of a passionate human mating.

  Lewis Mumford

  Quality, Essentials, Passionate

  Lewis Mumford, Robert Wojtowicz (2008). “Mumford on Modern Art in the 1930s”, p.58, Univ of California Press

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• The very people who shudder over the cruelty of the hunter are apt to forget that slaughter, in the grimmest sense of the word, is a process they entrust daily to the butcher; and that unlike the game of the forests, even the dumbest creatures of the slaughterhouse know what is in store for them.

  Lewis Mumford

  Animal, Games, People

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• The convenience of timekeeping is greatly overrated; and the people who practice it so faithfully that they lose the capacity for appreciating the fixed and the static and the spatially related experiences cut themselves off from a good part of reality.

  Lewis Mumford

  Time, Cutting, Reality

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• Deliberately, on every historic occasion, we piously fake events for the benefit of photographers, while the actual event often occurs in a different fashion; and we have the effrontery to call these artful dress rehearsals authentic historic documents.

  Lewis Mumford

  Fashion, Fake, Events

  Lewis Mumford, Casey Nelson Blake (2000). “Art and Technics”, p.97, Columbia University Press

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• Because of their origin and purpose, the meanings of art are of a different order from the operational meanings of science and technics: they relate, not to external means and consequences, but to internal transformations, and unless it produce these internal transformations the work of art is either perfunctory or dead.

  Lewis Mumford

  Art, Mean, Order

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• The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.

  Lewis Mumford

  Running, Spiritual, Long

  Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner (2010). “Technics and Civilization”, p.16, University of Chicago Press

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• Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.

  Lewis Mumford

  Dream, Art, Expression

  "Interpretations and Forecasts 1922-1972" by Lewis Mumford, (p. 399), 1973.

  53 Copy quote

• Each religion is a brave guess at the authorship of Hamlet. Yet, as far as the play goes, does it make any difference whether Shakespeare or Bacon wrote it? Would it make any difference to the actors if their parts happened out of nothingness, if they found themselves acting on the stage because of some gross and unpardonable accident? Would it make any difference if the playwright gave them the lines or whether they composed them themselves, so long as the lines were properly spoken? Would it make any difference to the characters if 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' was really a dream?

  Lewis Mumford

  God, Dream, Character

  "My Works and Days". Book by Lewis Mumford. Chapter 2, 1979.

  5 Copy quote

• Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.

  Lewis Mumford

  Sports, Order, Skills

  "Technics and Civilization" by Lewis Mumford, Ch. 6, (sct. 11), 1934.

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• In its revolt against congestion and sordor, a space-hungry generation has, I fear, developed eyes that are bigger than its stomach.

  Lewis Mumford

  Eye, Space, Generations

  Lewis Mumford (1964). “The High Way and the City”, New American Library of Canada

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• Without leisure there can be neither art nor science nor fine conversation, nor any ceremonious performance of the offices of love and friendship.

  Lewis Mumford

  Art, Office, Love And Friendship

  Lewis Mumford (1979). “My works and days: a personal chronicle”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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• Integration proceeds by just the opposite route: a deliberate heightening of every organic function; a release of impulses from circumstances that irrationally thwarted them; richer and more complex patterns of activity; an esthetic heightening of anticipated realizations; a steady lengthening of the future; a faith in cosmic perspectives.

  Lewis Mumford

  Love, Faith, Opposites

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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

  Men, America, Safety

  Lewis Mumford (1979). “My works and days: a personal chronicle”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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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.

  Lewis Mumford

  Cells, Heaven, Needs

  Lewis Mumford (1979). “My works and days: a personal chronicle”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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• If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.

  Lewis Mumford

  Self, Soul, Machines

  Lewis Mumford (1970). “The myth of the machine”

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• Chaos, if it does not harden into a pattern of disorder, may be more fruitful than a regularity too easily accepted and a success too easily achieved.

  Lewis Mumford

  Doe, May, Patterns

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• The earth is the Lord's fullness thereof: this is no longer a hollow dictum of religion, but a directive for economic action toward human brotherhood.

  Lewis Mumford

  Humanity, Brotherhood, Earth

  Lewis Mumford (1954). “In the Name of Sanity”, New York : Harcourt, Brace

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• War is a specific product of civilization.

  Lewis Mumford

  War, Civilization, Products

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• Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.

  Lewis Mumford

  Goal, Perfection, Utopia

  Lewis Mumford (1979). “My works and days: a personal chronicle”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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• War is both the product of an earlier corruption, and a producer of new corruptions.

  Lewis Mumford

  War, Corruption, Producers

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• In vulgar usage, progress has come to mean limitless movement in space and time, accompanied, necessarily, by an equally limitless command of energy: culminating in limitless destruction.

  Lewis Mumford

  Mean, Space, Progress

  Lewis Mumford (1974). “The Pentagon of Power”, Harcourt

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• One's worst enormities remain within, and it is only one's vulgar commonplaces of error and folly that turn into murders and suicides, treasons, infidelities, and betrayals.

  Lewis Mumford

  Suicide, Betrayal, Errors

  Lewis Mumford (1979). “My works and days: a personal chronicle”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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• Adventure is humdrum and routine unless one assimilates it, unless one relates it to a central core which grows within and gives it contour and significance. Raw experience is empty, just as empty as the forecastle of a whaler as in a chamber of a counting house; for it is not what one does, but in a manifold sense, what one realizes that keeps existence from being vain and trivial.

  Lewis Mumford

  Adventure, Giving, House

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