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… - Lewis Mumford

The repeated deaths of civilizations from internal disintegration and outward assault, massively documented by Arnold Toynbee, underscores the fact that the evil elements in this amalgam largely cancelled the benefits and blessings. The one lasting contribution of the megamachine was the myth of the machine itself: the notion that this machine was, by its very nature, absolutely irresistible- and yet, provided one did not oppose it, ultimately beneficent. That magical spell still enthralls both the controllers and the mass victims of the megamachine today.

Loving underlies effective learning: indeed, it is the basis of all cultural transference and interchange. No teaching machine can supply this.

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.