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… - Lewis Mumford

"Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception, or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created."

We effectively became “time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers” with the invention of the clock.

Forget the damned motor car and built cities for lovers and friends .

In a sense the dramatic dialogue is both the fullest symbol and the final justification of the city's life. For the same reason, the most revealing symbol of the city's failure, of its very non-existence as a social personality, is the absence of dialogue-not necessarily a silence, but equally the loud sound of a chorus uttering the same words in cowed if complacent conformity. The silence of a dead city has more dignity than the vocalisms of a community that knows neither detachment nor dialectic opposition, neither ironic comment nor stimulating disparity, neither an intelligent conflict nor an active moral resolution. Such a drama is bound to have a fatal last act.