Best 130 quotes of Lewis Mumford on MyQuotes

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

This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid.

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

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

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

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.

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

Trend is not destiny.

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.

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.

Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal.

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

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.

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

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception, or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created." We effectively became “time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers” with the invention of the clock.

Toute transformation sociale (...) s'est fondée sur de nouvelles bases métaphysiques et idéologiques; ou plutôt, sur des émotions et intuitions plus profondes, dont l'expression rationalisée prend la forme du cosmos et de la nature de l'homme.