Lewis Mumford quotes

Lewis Mumford was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher, and influential critic of cities and technology. Renowned for his writings on urban development and the social impacts of science and technology, he shaped the way people think about the built environment. He emphasized the importance of human values in urban planning and remains a key figure in the study of modern cities. Here are 103 of his quotes:

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. (Lewis Mumford)
Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends. View quote
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. View quote
Lewis Mumford
War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society. View quote
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. View quote
Lewis Mumford
New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city. View quote
Lewis Mumford
Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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)
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. View quote
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. View quote
Lewis Mumford
Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Lewis Mumford
By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed. View quote
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. View quote
Lewis Mumford
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. View quote
Lewis Mumford
Man's chief purpose...is the creation and preservation of values: that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life. View quote
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)
Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities. View quote
Lewis Mumford
A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind. View quote
Lewis Mumford
A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail. View quote
Lewis Mumford
Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them. View quote
Lewis Mumford