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Even when the pioneer didn't rape Nature, he divorced her a little too easily: he missed the great lesson that both ecology and medicine teach - that Man's great mission is not to conquer nature by main force but to cooperate with her intelligently but lovingly for his own purposes.

— Lewis Mumford

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Environment

More quotes by Lewis Mumford

Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.

The Culture of Cities (1938)

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.

The City in History (1961)

Nothing is permanent: certainly not the frozen images of barbarous power with which fascism now confronts us.

The Culture of Cities (1938)

The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.

Technics and Civilization (1934)

In this situation the artist has a special task and duty: the task of reminding men of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.

In the Name of Sanity (1954)

All Lewis Mumford quotes →

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We have come tardily to the tremendous task of cleaning up our environment.

Gerald Ford

"Don't waste the Earth — it is our Jewel!"

Buzz Aldrin

All our efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development will be in vain if environmental degradation and natural resource depletion continue unabated.

Kofi Annan

We will look upon the earth and her sister planets as being with us, not for us.

Mary Daly Beyond God the Father (1973)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Lewis Mumford (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.