Lewis Mumford
Lewis MumfordArt is of a different order from the operational meanings of science and technics. Art relates 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.
The Artist is tasked with reminding men of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.
Authoritarian technology is a system-centered, immensely powerful and unstable kind of technology. Contrasted with a technology that is democratic, man-centered, and relatively weak, but resourceful and durable.
Boredom is a modern phenomenon experienced in earlier civilizations only by the privileged classes enabled by man's very success in inventing labor-saving devices.
The Car is so pervasive in the US that our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
The City is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city... and in turn, urban forms condition mind.
The City is even in its most developed stage, an earth form. It is put together out of wood, stone, clay, asphaltum, glass. Its shape is conditioned by topography and the nature of the land... and the special requisites of the site'.
The City 1s 2hief function is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.
The City is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community. The city is an educative process, a civilizing order.
The City is the theater of social action : Cities have a relationship to their social environment before their physical environment. They by the same token, they have social, rather than physical nuclei (schools, theaters, community centers) whose relations lay the outline of an integrated city.
Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
Intelligence is a thing among whose important functions is to take account of the dangers inherent in over-relying on intelligence.
Leadership is the preeminence of one or a few individuals in a group in the process of control of societal phenomena.
