Best 130 quotes of Lewis Mumford on MyQuotes

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.

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

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.

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

Adventure is humdrum and routine unless one assimilates it, unless one relates it to a central core which grows within and gives it contour and significance. Raw experience is empty, just as empty as the forecastle of a whaler as in a chamber of a counting house; for it is not what one does, but in a manifold sense, what one realizes that keeps existence from being vain and trivial.

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

A multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to the common mold.

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.

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

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.

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.

Because of their origin and purpose, the meanings of art are of a different order from the operational meanings of science and technics: they relate, not to external means and consequences, but to internal transformations, and unless it produce these internal transformations the work of art is either perfunctory or dead.

Before modern man can gain control over the forces that now threaten his very existence, he must resume possession of himself. This sets the chief mission for the city of the future: that of creating a visible regional and civic structure, designed to make man at home with his deeper self and his larger world, attached to images of human nature and love.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

Everyone aimed at security: no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before the barbarian invasions had done their work, long before economic dislocations became serious, was inner go. Rome’s life was now an imitation of life: a mere holding on. Security was the watchword – as if life knew any other stability than through constant change, or any form of security except through a constant willingness to take risks

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

In the name of economy a thousand wasteful devices would be invented; and in the name of efficiency new forms of mechanical time-wasting would be devised: both processes gained speed through the nineteenth century and have come close to the limit of extravagant futility in our own time. But labor-saving devices could only achieve their end-that of freeing mankind for higher functions-if the standard of living remained stable. The dogma of increasing wants nullified every real economy and set the community in a collective squirrel-cage.

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.

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

Iron and coal dominated everywhere, from grey to black: the black boots, the black stove-pipe hat, the black coach or carriage, the black iron frame of the hearth, the black cooking pots and pans and stoves. Was it a mourning? Was it protective coloration? Was it mere depression of the senses? No matter what the original color of the paleotechnic milieu might be it was soon reduced by reason of the soot and cinders that accompanied its activities, to its characteristic tones, grey, dirty-brown, black.