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" Collective military aggression, I submit, is as much a special invention of civilization as is the collective expression of curiosity through systematic scientific investigation. The fact that human beings are naturally curious did not lead inevitably to organized science; and the fact that they are given to anger and pugnacity was not sufficient in itself to create the institution of war. The latter, like science, is an historic, culture-bound achievement-witness to a much more devious connection between complexity, crisis, frustration, and aggression. Here the ants have more to teach us than the apes- or the supposedly combative 'cave man', whose purely imaginary traits strangely resemble those of a nineteenth-century capitalist enterpriser. "
― Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
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" The development of symbolic methods of storage immensely increased the capacity of the city as a container: it not merely held together a larger body of people and institutions than any other kind of community, but it maintained and transmitted a larger portion of their lives than individual human memories could transmit by word of mouth. This condensation and storage, for the purpose of enlarging the boundaries of the community in time and space, is one of the singular functions performed by the city; and the degree to which it is performed partly establishes the rank and value of the city; for other municipal functions, however essential, are mainly accessory and preparatory. The city, as Emerson well observed, "lives by remembering. "
― Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects