Toute transformation sociale (...) s'est fondée sur de nouvelles bases métaphysiques et idéologiques; ou plutôt, sur des émotions et intuitions plus … - Lewis Mumford

What distinguishes language from isolated gestures and signs, no matter how numerous, is that it forms a complex ramifying structure, which in its conceptual entirety presents a Wiltbild or comprehensive symbolic framework capable of embracing many aspects of reality: not a static representation like a picture or a sculpture, but a moving picture of things, events, processes, ideas, purposes, in which every word is surrounded by a rich penumbra of original concrete experiences, and every sentence brings with it some degree of novelty, if only because time and place, intention and recipient, change its meaning. Contrary to Bergson, language is the least geometric, the least static; of all the arts.

If we note attentively the aberrations of the ruling classes throughout history, we shall see how far most of them were from understanding the limitations of mere physical power, and of a life that centered upon an effortless consumption: the reduced life of the parasite on a tolerant host. The boredom of satiety dogged this economy of surplus power and surplus goods from the very beginning: it led to insensate personal luxury and ever more insensate acts of collective delinquency and destruction. Both were means of establishing the superior status of the ruling minority, whose desires knew no limits and whose very crimes turned into Nietzschean virtues.

In the mass movement into the suburban areas a new kind of community was produced, which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban refuge: a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.”