Lewis Mumford Quotes

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

Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

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

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

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.

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

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

Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.

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

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

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 the training...

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.

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The earth is the Lord's fullness thereof: this is no longer a hollow dictum of religion, but a directive for economic action toward human brotherhood.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility.

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

Order and creativity are complementary.

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.

I'm a pessimist about probabilities, I'm an optimist about possibilities.

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

Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.

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

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

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

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