Lewis Mumford Quotes

#1. The paradox of this arrangement was not lost on Lewis Mumford, who described suburbia as "a collective effort to live a private life." In many ways, this goes to the heart of the matter, for it is a project based on self-contradiction - the tragedy of American domestic

Morris Berman

#2. There are only two living American authors fully deserving of the Nobel Prize. One is Lewis Mumford. The other is Wallace Stegner, whose novels and essays provide us a comprehensive portrait of industrial society in all its glittering corruption and radiant evil.

Edward Abbey

#3. The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.

Lewis Mumford

#4. Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.

Lewis Mumford

#5. 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

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

Lewis Mumford

#7. By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.

Lewis Mumford

#8. Each person is a temporary focus of forces, vitalities, and values that carry back to an immemorial past and that reach forward into an unthinkable future.

Lewis Mumford

#9. Only when love takes the lead will the earth, and life on earth, be safe again. And not until then.

Lewis Mumford

#10. Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.

Lewis Mumford

#11. We have lost faith in the formal powers of the mind, not, as some suppose, because our universe is too difficult to grasp, but because we lack the inner principle of order.

Lewis Mumford

#12. 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

#13. Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.

Lewis Mumford

#14. A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.

Lewis Mumford

#15. 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

#16. In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.

Lewis Mumford

#17. 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

#18. The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.

Lewis Mumford

#19. When vitality runs high, death takes men by surprise. But if they close their eyes to this possibility, what they gain in peace they lose in sensibility and significance.

Lewis Mumford

#20. Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.

Lewis Mumford

#21. Without leisure there can be neither art nor science nor fine conversation, nor any ceremonious performance of the offices of love and friendship.

Lewis Mumford

#22. 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

#23. He who touches the soil of Manhattan and the pavement of New York, touches, whenever he knows or not, Walt Whitman.

Lewis Mumford

#24. War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

Lewis Mumford

#25. Our megatechnic culture, based as it is on the strange supposition that subjective malice has no reality and that evils do not exist, except in the sense of reparable mechanical defects, has proved itself incompetent to take on such responsibilities.

Lewis Mumford

#26. Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.

Lewis Mumford

#27. I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, "This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!"

Lewis Mumford

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

Lewis Mumford

#29. The humanities and science are not in inherent conflict but have become separated in the twentieth century. Now their essential unity must be re-emphasized, so that twentieth-century multiplicity may become twentieth-century unity.

Lewis Mumford

#30. War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.

Lewis Mumford

#31. Deliberately, on every historic occasion, we piously fake events for the benefit of photographers, while the actual event often occurs in a different fashion; and we have the effrontery to call these artful dress rehearsals authentic historic documents.

Lewis Mumford

#32. Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.

Lewis Mumford

#33. Neither democracy nor effective representation is possible until each participant in the group ... devotes a measurable part of his life to furthering its existence.

Lewis Mumford

#34. Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.

Lewis Mumford

#35. The convenience of timekeeping is greatly overrated; and the people who practice it so faithfully that they lose the capacity for appreciating the fixed and the static and the spatially related experiences cut themselves off from a good part of reality.

Lewis Mumford

#36. If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.

Lewis Mumford

#37. It was Stieglitz's endeavor ... to translate the unseen world of tactile values as they develop between lovers not merely into the sexual act but the entire relation of two personalities - to translate this world of blind touch into sight.

Lewis Mumford

#38. 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

#39. New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.

Lewis Mumford

#40. The Fujiyama of Architecture?at once a lofty mountain and a national shrine.

Lewis Mumford

#41. 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

#42. War is both the product of an earlier corruption, and a producer of new corruptions.

Lewis Mumford

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old.

Lewis Mumford

#46. By putting business before every other manifestation of life, our mechanical and financial civilization has forgotten the chief business of life: namely, growth, reproduction, development. It pays infinite attention to the incubator-and it forgets the egg!

Lewis Mumford

#47. 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

#48. One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.

Lewis Mumford

#49. 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

#50. The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.

Lewis Mumford

#51. Do you want to know what I most regret about my youth? That I didn't dream more boldly and demand of myself more impossible things; for all one does in maturity is to carve in granite or porphyry the soap bubble one blew in youth! Oh to have dreamed harder!

Lewis Mumford

#52. Above all we need, particularly as children, the reassuring presence of a visible community, an intimate group that enfolds us with understanding and love, and that becomes an object of our spontaneous loyalty, as a criterion and point of reference for the rest of the human race.

Lewis Mumford

#53. If we never met again in our lives I should feel that somehow the whole adventure of existence was justified by my having met you.

Lewis Mumford

#54. As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used - as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts - to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera.

Lewis Mumford

#55. Faith in the creative process, in the dynamics of emergence, in the values and purposes that transcend past achievements and past forms, is the precondition of all further growth.

Lewis Mumford

#56. When cities were first founded, an old Egyptian scribe tells us, the mission of the founder was to 'put gods in their shrines.' The task of the coming city is not essentially different: its mission is to put the highest concerns of man at the center of all his activities.

Lewis Mumford

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

Lewis Mumford

#58. Order and creativity are complementary.

Lewis Mumford

#59. Not sense data or atoms or electrons or packets of energy, but purposes, interests, and meanings, constitute the underlying facts of human experience.

Lewis Mumford

#60. The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.

Lewis Mumford

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.

Lewis Mumford

#65. Don't take the will for the deed; get the deed.

Lewis Mumford

#66. A picture was once a rare sort of symbol, rare enough to call for attentive concentration. Now it is the actual experience that is rare, and the picture has become ubiquitous.

Lewis Mumford

#67. Man's Chief purpose ... is the creation and preservation of values; that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life.

Lewis Mumford

#68. Safety razors make it hard to grow beards in America: America would be a better place if there were a few bearded, savage, terrible old men.

Lewis Mumford

#69. The very people who shudder over the cruelty of the hunter are apt to forget that slaughter, in the grimmest sense of the word, is a process they entrust daily to the butcher; and that unlike the game of the forests, even the dumbest creatures of the slaughterhouse know what is in store for them.

Lewis Mumford

#70. Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act.

Lewis Mumford

#71. In its revolt against congestion and sordor, a space-hungry generation has, I fear, developed eyes that are bigger than its stomach.

Lewis Mumford

#72. Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.

Lewis Mumford

#73. 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 framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

Lewis Mumford

#74. One's worst enormities remain within, and it is only one's vulgar commonplaces of error and folly that turn into murders and suicides, treasons, infidelities, and betrayals.

Lewis Mumford

#75. Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf

Lewis Mumford

#76. The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.

Lewis Mumford

#77. Genuine [economic] value lies in the power to sustain or enrich life

Lewis Mumford

#78. In our entrancement with the motorcar, we have forgotten how much more efficient and how much more flexible the footwalker is.

Lewis Mumford

#79. 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

#80. On any pure theory of causality or statistical probability, organization would be completely improbable without the external aid of a divine organizer.

Lewis Mumford

#81. To the extent that the scientist's capacity for pursuing the truth depends upon costly apparatus, institutional collaboration and heavy capital investment by government or industry he is no longer his own master.

Lewis Mumford

#82. Geneva has the sleepy tidiness of a man who combs his hair while yet in his pyjamas.

Lewis Mumford

#83. Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.

Lewis Mumford

#84. Chaos, if it does not harden into a pattern of disorder, may be more fruitful than a regularity too easily accepted and a success too easily achieved.

Lewis Mumford

#85. The artist has a special task and duty ... reminding people of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.

Lewis Mumford

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. Henceforward, I shout to the heavens, I shall deliver no more lectures on behalf of good causes: I am the good cause that denies the need for such lectures. Avaunt, importuning world! Back to my cell.

Lewis Mumford

#89. The mind reproduces itself by transmitting its symbols to other intermediaries, human and mechanical, than the particular brain that first assembled them.

Lewis Mumford

#90. 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

#91. In vulgar usage, progress has come to mean limitless movement in space and time, accompanied, necessarily, by an equally limitless command of energy: culminating in limitless destruction.

Lewis Mumford

#92. The final goal of human effort is man's self-transforma tion.

Lewis Mumford

#93. The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.

Lewis Mumford

#94. I'm a pessimist about probabilities; I'm an optimist about possibilities.

Lewis Mumford

#95. It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man's principal toy and tool: without the meanings and values it sustains, all man's other tools would be worthless.

Lewis Mumford

#96. The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans.

Lewis Mumford

#97. Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

Lewis Mumford

#98. Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.

Lewis Mumford

#99. Every transformation of humanity has rested upon deep stirrings and intuitions, whose rationalized expression takes the form of a new picture of the cosmos and the nature of the human.

Lewis Mumford

#100. Happiness, I think, lies on the surface ... when one plunges under the surface all the buoyant things disappear, and the farther down one gets the more cold and dark it seems: and the more oppressive space feels.

Lewis Mumford