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… - Lewis Mumford

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.

But perhaps the greatest threat to the efficiency of the megamachine came from within: from its rigidity and repression of individual ability, and from a sheer lack of rational purpose.

Now the equipment, organization, and tactics of an army were not achieved overnight: one must allow for a period of transition before a large mass of men could be trained to operate under unified command. Until towns arose and population was sufficiently concentrated, the prelude to war was an organized but one-sided display of power and bellicosity in raiding expeditions for wood, malachite, gold, slaves.