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By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.
Lewis Mumford -
Bloodshed kept pace with iron production: in essence, the entire paleotechnic period was ruled, from beginning to end, by the policy of blood and iron. The brutal contempt for life was equalled only by the the almost priestly ritual it developed for inflicting death. Its 'peace' was indeed the peace that passeth understanding: what was it but latent warfare.
Lewis Mumford
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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 -
That was the danger Samuel Butler jestingly prophesied in Erewhon, the danger that the human being might become a means whereby the machine perpetuated itself and extended its dominion.
Lewis Mumford -
Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further development.
Lewis Mumford -
I'm a pessimist about probabilities, I'm an optimist about possibilities.
Lewis Mumford -
A community whose life is not irrigated by art and science, by religion and philosophy, day upon day, is a community that exists half alive.
Lewis Mumford -
We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end.
Lewis Mumford
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However far modern science and technics have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson: Nothing is impossible.
Lewis Mumford -
One of the marks of maturity is the need for solitude: a city should not merely draw men together in many varied activities, but should permit each person to find, near at hand, moments of seclusion and peace.
Lewis Mumford -
Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
Lewis Mumford -
This essential coalition between royal military power and often dubious supernatural authority anticipated a similar alliance between the scientists and mathematical games theorists with the higher agents of government today, and was subject to similar corruptions, miscalculations, and hallucinations.
Lewis Mumford -
On one side is the gigantic printing press, a miracle of fine articulation, which turns out the tabloid newspaper: on the other side are the contents of the tabloid itself, symbolically recording the most crude and elementary states of emotion.
Lewis Mumford -
New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
Lewis Mumford