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Lewis Mumford war ein US-amerikanischer Architekturkritiker und Wissenschaftler. Eine nähere Kategorisierung als Historiker, Philosoph, Soziologe oder gar Schriftsteller wird dem interdisziplinären Charakter von Mumfords vielfältigem Schaffen kaum gerecht. Im deutschen Sprachraum ist Mumford vor allem durch seine Schriften zur Geschichte der Stadt und der Technik bekannt. Wikipedia  

✵ 19. Oktober 1895 – 26. Januar 1990  •  Andere Namen Льюїс Мамфорд
Lewis Mumford Foto
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Lewis Mumford: Zitate auf Englisch

“A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind. Even a head wind is better than none. No man ever worked his passage anywhere in a dead calm.”

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Lewis Mumford

John Neal, as quoted in The Journal of Education for Upper Canada Vol. III (1850)
Misattributed

“I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, "This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!"”

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Lewis Mumford

Address to the National Book Awards Committee, published in My Works and Days (1979)

“The recoil from the absolute of mechanism was into an equally sterile absolute of the organic: the raw primitive. The organic processes, reduced to shadows by the machine, made a violent effort to retrieve their position. The machine, which acerbically denied the flesh, was offset by the flesh, which denied the rational, the intelligent, the orderly processes of behavior that have entered into all man’s cultural developments—even those developments that most closely derive from the organic. The spurious notion that mechanism had naught to learn from life was supplanted by the equally false notion that life had nothing to learn from mechanism.”

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Lewis Mumford buch Technics and Civilization

Quelle: Technics and Civilization (1934), Ch. 6, sct. 9

“War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.”

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Lewis Mumford buch Technics and Civilization

Quelle: Technics and Civilization (1934), Ch. 6, sct. 11

“There is no necessary connection between the important events of a life and the records of it that have been preserved in memory, in documents, in memorials, or in living testimony. The biographer must compose his life of what he has, just as the archeologist must restore his temple or his statue with such fragments as thieving time and careless men have left him; but fate often ironically leaves him a well-preserved leg and a dismembered torso, while the head, which would supply the main clue to the body, is missing. Hence, in addition to the purposive selection exercised by the subject himself and by the biographer in making use of such materials as are left, there exists a purely external selection dominated by chance, which cuts across the evidence in an arbitrary fashion. To correct for such distortions the biographer must be an anatomist of character: he must be able to restore the missing nose in plaster, even if he does not find the original marble.”

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Lewis Mumford

Quelle: My Works and Days (1979), Ch. 14

“Virtue is not a chemical product, as Taine once described it: 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. That, I submit, is what has happened in our own lifetime.”

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Lewis Mumford

Values for Survival (1946)

“We arrest our inner creativity with external compulsions and irrelevant anxieties, at the mercy of constant interruptions by telephone and radio and insistent print, timing our lives to the movement of a production belt we do not control. At the same time, we give authority to the stomach, the muscles, the genitals--to animal reflexes that produce obedient consumers, whip-wielding man-trainers, slavish political subjects, push-button automatons.”

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Lewis Mumford

CHALLENGE: Diagnosis of Our Times
The Conduct Of Life (1951)

“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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Lewis Mumford buch Technics and Civilization

Quelle: Technics and Civilization (1934), Chapter 6, § 9

“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.”

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Lewis Mumford buch Technics and Civilization

Quelle: Technics and Civilization (1934), Ch. 6, sct. 9

“I'm a pessimist about probabilities, I'm an optimist about possibilities.”

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Lewis Mumford

As quoted in "Lewis Mumford Remembers" by Carey Winfrey in The New York Times (6 July 1977)

“The aggregation of the spiritual life from the practical life is a curse that falls impartially upon both sides of our existence. 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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Lewis Mumford

Faith for Living (1940)

“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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Lewis Mumford

Quelle: The Culture of Cities (1938), Ch. 7, sct. 16

“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.”

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Lewis Mumford buch Technics and Civilization

Quelle: Technics and Civilization (1934), Ch. 6, sct. 9

“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.”

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Lewis Mumford

"The Way and the Life"
The Conduct Of Life (1951)

“…in general, the traditionalists are backward-looking, conservative; pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.”

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Lewis Mumford

Often quoted as "Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.", e.g, Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 112.
Faith for Living (1940)

“Man's chief purpose…is the creation and preservation of values: that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life.”

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Lewis Mumford

Faith for Living (1940)

“In the elemental emotions of fear and rage associated with the most primitive parts of the brain, this swift response without conscious intervention or direction is a condition of survival: but something more than survival comes forth from it; for this very automatism freed the growing brain and ramifying nervous system for more important services, detached from the immediate pressure for survival, performed by the new brain. Here by his conscious symbolic activities man created a second realm that conforms more closely to his higher personal and social needs.”

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Lewis Mumford buch The Myth of the Machine

pg 397
The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970), The Pentagon of Power (1970)

“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.”

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Lewis Mumford

"The Drama of the Machines" in Scribner's Magazine (August 1930)

“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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Lewis Mumford buch The Myth of the Machine

Technical Liberation
The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970), The Pentagon of Power (1970)

“It is our utopias that make the world tolerable to us: the cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.”

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Lewis Mumford

The Story of Utopias, Chapter One http://books.google.com/books?id=846mSPr_kaUC&q=%22It+is+our+utopias+that+make+the+world+tolerable+to+us+the+cities+and+mansions+that+people+dream+of+are+those+in+which+they+finally+live%22&pg=PA11#v=onepage (1922).

“If, as many anthropologists still hold, the making and using of tools as one of the chief sources of primitive man's intellectual development, is it not time that we asked ourselves what will happen to man if he departs as completely as he now threatens to do from his primal polytechnic occupations? Since they can no longer be pursued at a profit, perhaps they will have to be restored as modes of sport and recreation, even more as helpful — increasingly essential — forms of personal service and mutual aid.”

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Lewis Mumford buch The Myth of the Machine

Technical Liberation
The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970), The Pentagon of Power (1970)

“Modern industrial design is based on the principle of conspicuous economy [but] the bourgeois culture which dominates the Western World is founded… on the principle of conspicuous waste.”

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Lewis Mumford

Lewis Mumford (1930) Modern American design. R.L. Leonard, & ‎C.A. Glassgold (eds.), ‎American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen. p. 9; As cited in: V.T. Clayton et al. Drawing on America's Past, p. 28

“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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Lewis Mumford

"Revolt of the Demons", p. 399
Interpretations and Forecasts 1922-1972 (1973)

“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.”

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Lewis Mumford

"Planning for the Phases of Life" http://books.google.com/books?id=JypxP4R4cogC&q=%22One+of+the+marks+of+maturity+is+the+need+for%22+%22a+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%22&pPA40#v=onepage, The Urban Prospect: Essays (1968)

“New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.”

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Lewis Mumford

My Works and Days (1979)

“Failing to divide its social chromosomes and split up into new cells, each bearing some portion of the original inheritance, the city continues to grow inorganically, indeed cancerously, by a continuous breaking down of old tissues, and an overgrowth of formless new tissue. Here the city has absorbed villages and little towns, reducing them to place names, like Manhattanville and Harlem in New York; there it has, more happily, left the organs of local government and the vestiges of an independent life, even assisted their revival, as in Chelsea and Kensington in London; but it has nevertheless enveloped those areas in its physical organization and built up the open land that once served to ensure their identity and integrity.”

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Lewis Mumford buch The City in History

Sprawling Giantism
The City in History (1961)

“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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Lewis Mumford

As quoted in Philosophers of the Earth : Conversations with Ecologists (1972) by Anne Chisholm

“But what would become of mass production and its system of financial expansion if technical perfection, durability, social efficiency, and human satisfaction were the guiding aims. The very conditions for current financial success — constantly expanding production and replacement — works against these ends. To ensure the rapid absorption of its immense productivity, megatechnics resorts to a score of different devices: consumer credit, installment buying, multiple packaging, non-functional designs, meretricious novelties, shoddy materials, defective workmanship, built-in fragility, or forced obsolescence through frequent arbitrary changes of fashion. Without constant enticement and inveiglement by advertising, production would slow down and level off to normal replacement demand. Otherwise many products could reach a plateau of efficient design which would call for only minimal changes from year to year.”

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Lewis Mumford buch The Myth of the Machine

Megatechnic Costs and Benefits
The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970), The Pentagon of Power (1970)

“Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.”

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Lewis Mumford

The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America, 1865-1895 (1931), p. 3

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