"A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind."
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Quote collection
Lewis Mumford quotes (page 1 of 7)
135 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past."
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"What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself"
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"The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live."
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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."
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"Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity."
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"A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life."
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"Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers."
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"A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail."
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"Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends."
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"Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities."
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"To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity."
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"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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"When cities were first founded, an old Egyptian scribe tells us, the mission of the founder was to 'put gods in their shrines.' The task of the coming city is not essentially different: its mission is to put the highest concerns of man at the center of all his activities."
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"The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity."
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"Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline."
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"Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf."
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"Life is an art we are required to practice without preparation, a score that we play at sight even before we have mastered our instruments."
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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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"The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it."
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