Lewis Mumford Short Quotes

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War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

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

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

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

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

Lewis Mumford
What is any established institution but a Society for the Prevention of Change?

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

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

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

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

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

Lewis Mumford
Only when love takes the lead will the earth, and life on earth, be safe again. And not until then.

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

Lewis Mumford
The clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men.

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

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

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
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.

Lewis Mumford
In its revolt against congestion and sordor, a space-hungry generation has, I fear, developed eyes that are bigger than its stomach.

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

Lewis Mumford
Safety razors make it hard to grow beards in America: America would be a better place if there were a few bearded, savage, terrible old men.

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

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
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.

Lewis Mumford
A Society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure and to another all the burdens of work condemns both classes to spiritual sterility.

Lewis Mumford