Lewis Mumford Quotes

90 Sourced Quotes

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
Now 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 of a mere beginner.

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

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
War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

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

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

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
For over against the convenience of instantaneous communication is the fact that the great economical abstractions of writing, reading, and drawing, the media of reflective thought and deliberate action, will be weakened.

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

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

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

Lewis Mumford
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
(The processes are) doubly ruinous: they impoverish the earth by hastily removing, for the benefit of a few generations, the common resources which, once expended and dissipated, can never be restored; and second, in its technique, its habits, its processes, the paleotechnic period is equally inimical to the earth considered as a human habitat, by its destruction of the beauty of the landscape, its ruining of streams, its pollution of drinking water, its filling the air with a finely divided carboniferous deposit, which chokes both life and vegetation.

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
In the elemental emotions of fear and rage associated with the most primitive parts of the brain, this swift response without conscious intervention or direction is a condition of survival: but something more than survival comes forth from it; for this very automatism freed the growing brain and ramifying nervous system for more important services, detached from the immediate pressure for survival, performed by the new brain. Here by his conscious symbolic activities man created a second realm that conforms more closely to his higher personal and social needs.

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

Lewis Mumford