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Quotes by Lewis Mumford

A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.
– 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
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
Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.
– 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
It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man's principal toy and tool: without the meanings and values it sustains, all man's other tools would be worthless.
– Lewis Mumford
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 training.
– Lewis Mumford
New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
– Lewis Mumford
Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.
– 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
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
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
War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
– 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
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.
– Lewis Mumford
In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.
– Lewis Mumford
Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.
– Lewis Mumford
War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.
– Lewis Mumford
Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.
– Lewis Mumford
Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
– Lewis Mumford
The earth is the Lord's fullness thereof: this is no longer a hollow dictum of religion, but a directive for economic action toward human brotherhood.
– Lewis Mumford
The artist does not illustrate science (but) he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does.
– Lewis Mumford
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
– 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
However far modern science and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson nothing is impossible.
– Lewis Mumford
A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.
– Lewis Mumford