Lewis Mumford famous quotes

The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Dream #Cities #People

A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Beauty #Truth #Sight

The last step in parental love involves the release of the beloved; the willing cutting of the cord that would otherwise keep the child in a state of emotional dependence.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Children #Parenting #Cutting

Life is an art we are required to practice without preparation, a score that we play at sight even before we have mastered our instruments.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Art #Happy Life #Play

A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Inspirational #Motivational #Courage

Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Life #Art #Practice

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Funny #Witty #Flower

Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Travel #Mean #Cooking

A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Men #Needs #Bail

The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Real #Thinking #Government

The fact that order and creativity are complementary has been basic to man's cultural development; for he has to internalize order to be able to give external form to his creativity.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Creativity #Men #Order

Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Men #Self #Discipline

Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Technology #Novelty #Arbitrary

Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Family #Father #Grandparent

Virtue is not a chemical product... it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Mean #Keys #Literature

Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further development.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Needs #Development #Impossible

Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal." Even more unfortunately, the industries that are favored by such expansion must, to maintain their output, be devoted to goods that are readily consumable either by their nature, or because they are so shoddily fabricated that they must soon be replaced. By fashion and built-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Fashion #Mean #Goal

However far modern science and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson; nothing is impossible.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Positive #Science #Technology

Don't take the will for the deed; get the deed.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Ambition #Deeds

Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Obesity #Lanes #Traffic

Genuine [economic] value lies in the power to sustain or enrich life
-- Lewis Mumford

#Lying #Economic #Genuine

We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Order #Issues #Finals

One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Ironic #Intelligence #Irony

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.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Art #Creativity #Cities

Each one of us, as long as life stirs is us, may play a part in extricating ourselves from the power system by asserting our primacy as people in quiet acts of mental or physical withdrawal-in gestures of non-conformity, in abstentions, restrictions, inhibitions, which will liberate us from the domination of the pentagon of power.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Play #Long #People

To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Art #Opportunity #Machines

A Society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure and to another all the burdens of work condemns both classes to spiritual sterility.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Spiritual #Opportunity #Class

Integration proceeds by just the opposite route: a deliberate heightening of every organic function; a release of impulses from circumstances that irrationally thwarted them; richer and more complex patterns of activity; an esthetic heightening of anticipated realizations; a steady lengthening of the future; a faith in cosmic perspectives.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Love #Opposites #Perspective

New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
-- Lewis Mumford

#New York #Cities #Perfect

What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself
-- Lewis Mumford

#Color #Goal #Personality

The Fujiyama of Architecture?at once a lofty mountain and a national shrine.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Mountain #Shrines #Architecture

The final goal of human effort is man's self-transforma tion.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Men #Self #Goal

While a great many other ideas and measures are of prime importance for the good life of the community, that which concerns its architectural expression is the notion of the community as limited in numbers, and in area... To express these relations clearly, to embody them in buildings and roads and gardens in which each individual structure will be subordinated to the whole - this is the end of community planning.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Good Life #Garden #Expression

Idealism and science continue to function in separate compartments; and yet 'the happiness of man on earth' depends upon their combination.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Men #Earth #Combination

The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Memories #Men #Cities

The life-efficiency and adaptability of the computer must be questioned. Its judicious use depends upon the availability of its human employers quite literally to keep their own heads, not merely to scrutinize the programming but to reserve for themselves the right of ultimate decision. No automatic system can be intelligently run byautomatonsor by people who dare not assert human intuition, human autonomy, human purpose.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Running #Availability #People

If there are favourable habitats and favorable forms of association for animalsand plants, as ecology demonstrates, why not for men? If each particular natural environment has has its own balance; is there not perhaps an equivalent of this in culture?
-- Lewis Mumford

#Men #Balance #Culture

Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Dream #Art #Expression

What plethora of material goods can possibly atone for a waking life so humanly belittling, if not degrading, as the push-button tasks left to human performers?
-- Lewis Mumford

#Buttons #Waking Life #Tasks

The physical lot of surviving workers had notably improved, with unemployment insurance, social security, and the new health services, while their children's school education was assured by the government-operated schools: in addition, they had, for intellectual or emotional stimulus and diversion, the radio and the television. But the work itself was no longer as various, as interesting, or as sustaining to the personality...
-- Lewis Mumford

#Children #School #Emotional

Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Blessing #Thug #People

(The processes are) doubly ruinous: they impoverish the earth by hastily removing, for the benefit of a few generations, the common resources which, once expended and dissipated, can never be restored; and second, in its technique, its habits, its processes, the paleotechnic period is equally inimical to the earth considered as a human habitat, by its destruction of the beauty of the landscape, its ruining of streams, its pollution of drinking water, its filling the air with a finely divided carboniferous deposit, which chokes both life and vegetation.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Drinking #Air #Water

The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Progress #Cacophony #Wonder

I'm a pessimist about probabilities; I'm an optimist about possibilities.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Optimism #Possibility #Pessimist

Each religion is a brave guess at the authorship of Hamlet. Yet, as far as the play goes does it make any difference whether Shakespeare or Bacon wrote it? Would it make any difference to the actors if their parts happened out of nothingness, if they found themselves acting on the stage because of some gross and unpardonable accident? Would it make any difference if the playwright gave them the lines or whether they composed them themselves, so long as the lines were properly spoken? Would it make any difference to the characters if A Midsummer Night's Dream was really a dream?
-- Lewis Mumford

#God #Dream #Character

When art seems to be empty of meaning, as no doubt some of the abstract painting of our own day actually does seem, what the painting says, indeed what the artist is shrieking at the top of his voice, is that life has become empty of all rational content and coherence, and that, in times like these, is far from a meaningless statement.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Art #Voice #Doubt

We must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to the expression of moral and aesthetic values as we now give to science, to invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Expression #Organization #Giving

Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Growth #Birth #Immortality

The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Art #Becoming #Transformation

For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old.
-- Lewis Mumford

#Mean #Progress #Accepting