Lewis Mumford

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

— Lewis Mumford

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

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

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

— Lewis Mumford

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

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

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

It is our utopias that make the world tolerable to us: the cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.

— Lewis Mumford

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

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

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

Modern industrial design is based on the principle of conspicuous economy [but] the bourgeois culture which dominates the Western World is founded... on the principle of conspicuous waste.

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

Virtue is not a chemical product, as Taine once described it: 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. That, I submit, is what has happened in our own lifetime.

— Lewis Mumford

Let us confess it: the human situation is always desperate.

— Lewis Mumford

Today, all the normal mischances of living have been multiplied, a million-fold, by the potentialities for destruction, for an unthinking act of collective suicide, which man's very triumphs in science and invention have brought about. In this situation the artist has a special task and duty: the task of reminding men of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

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

Here was my city, immense, overpowering, flooded with energy and light... The world, at that moment , opened before me, challenging me, beckoning me, demanding something of me that it would take more than a lifetime to give, but raising all my energies by its own vivid promise to a higher pitch.

— Lewis Mumford

The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap.\xa0And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion.

— Lewis Mumford

One of the marks of maturity is the need for solitude: a city should not merely draw men together in many varied activities, but should permit each person to find, near at hand, moments of seclusion and peace.

— Lewis Mumford

The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.

— Lewis Mumford

Bloodshed kept pace with iron production: in essence, the entire paleotechnic period was ruled, from beginning to end, by the policy of blood and iron. The brutal contempt for life was equalled only by the the almost priestly ritual it developed for inflicting death. Its "peace" was indeed the peace that passeth understanding: what was it but latent warfare.

— Lewis Mumford

That was the danger Samuel Butler jestingly prophesied in Erewhon, the danger that the human being might become a means whereby the machine perpetuated itself and extended its dominion.

— Lewis Mumford

On one side is the gigantic printing press, a miracle of fine articulation, which turns out the tabloid newspaper: on the other side are the contents of the tabloid itself, symbolically recording the most crude and elementary states of emotion.

— Lewis Mumford

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

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

— Lewis Mumford

Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.

— Lewis Mumford

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

However far modern science and technics have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson: Nothing is impossible.

— Lewis Mumford

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

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

The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

...in general, the traditionalists are backward-looking, conservative; pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

— Lewis Mumford

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

The fundamental values of a true community are elsewhere: in love, poetry, disinterested thought, the free use of the imagination, the pursuit of non-utilitarian activities, the production of non-profitmaking goods, the employment of non-consumable wealth - here are the sustaining values of a living culture.

— Lewis Mumford

A community whose life is not irrigated by art and science, by religion and philosophy, day upon day, is a community that exists half alive.

— Lewis Mumford

The aggregation of the spiritual life from the practical life is a curse that falls impartially upon both sides of our existence. 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.

— Lewis Mumford

Perhaps never before have the peoples of the world been so close to losing the very core of their humanity; for of what use are cosmic energies, if they are handled by disoriented and demoralized men?

— Lewis Mumford

We arrest our inner creativity with external compulsions and irrelevant anxieties, at the mercy of constant interruptions by telephone and radio and insistent print, timing our lives to the movement of a production belt we do not control. At the same time, we give authority to the stomach, the muscles, the genitals--to animal reflexes that produce obedient consumers, whip-wielding man-trainers, slavish political subjects, push-button automatons.

— Lewis Mumford

Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.

— Lewis Mumford

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

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

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

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

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

This essential coalition between royal military power and often dubious supernatural authority anticipated a similar alliance between the scientists and mathematical games theorists with the higher agents of government today, and was subject to similar corruptions, miscalculations, and hallucinations.

— Lewis Mumford

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

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

— Lewis Mumford

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

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

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

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford