Lewis Mumford's Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

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.

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

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

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

Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.

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

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

Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further development.

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

One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The artist does not illustrate science (but) he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does.

The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.

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

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