"A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility."
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Quote collection
Lewis Mumford quotes (page 4 of 7)
135 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Virtue is not a chemical product...it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key."
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"Order and creativity are complementary."
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"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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"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."
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"I'm a pessimist about probabilities, I'm an optimist about possibilities."
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"Idealism and science continue to function in separate compartments; and yet 'the happiness of man on earth' depends upon their combination."
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"Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence."
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"The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon."
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"While a great many other ideas and measures are of prime importance for the good life of the community, that which concerns its architectural expression is the notion of the community as limited in numbers, and in area... To express these relations clearly, to embody them in buildings and roads and gardens in which each individual structure will be subordinated to the whole - this is the end of community planning."
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"The physical lot of surviving workers had notably improved, with unemployment insurance, social security, and the new health services, while their children's school education was assured by the government-operated schools: in addition, they had, for intellectual or emotional stimulus and diversion, the radio and the television. But the work itself was no longer as various, as interesting, or as sustaining to the personality."
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"Don't take the will for the deed; get the deed."
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"One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence."
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"A picture was once a rare sort of symbol, rare enough to call for attentive concentration. Now it is the actual experience that is rare, and the picture has become ubiquitous."
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"The philosophers of industrialism, from Bacon to Bentham, from Smith to Marx, insisted that the improvement of man's condition was the highest requirement of morality. But in what did the improvement consist? The answer seemed so obvious to them that they did not bother to justify it: the expansion and fulfillment of the material wants of man, and the spread of these benefits, from the few who had once preempted them, to the many who had so long lived on the scraps Dives had thrown into the gutter."
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"Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day."
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"Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one."
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"Everyone aimed at security: no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before the barbarian invasions had done their work, long before economic dislocations became serious, was inner go. Rome’s life was now an imitation of life: a mere holding on. Security was the watchword – as if life knew any other stability than through constant change, or any form of security except through a constant willingness to take risks"
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"The Fujiyama of Architecture?at once a lofty mountain and a national shrine."
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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."
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