Lewis Mumford Quotes
Most popular Lewis Mumford Quotes
The self holds both a hell and a heaven.
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
One of the marks of maturity is the need for solitude.
A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.
Space travel is an extravagant feat of technological exhibitionism.
Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.
The clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men.
Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.
The artist does not illustrate science but he frequently, however, responds to the same interests that a scientist does.
One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.
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.
The last step in parental love involves the release of the beloved; the willing cutting of the cord that would otherwise keep the child in a state of emotional dependence.
The last step in parental love involves the release of the beloved; the willful cutting of the cord that would otherwise keep the child in a state of emotional dependence.
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.
An underlying urge to self-transformation possibly lies at the basis of all existence, finding expression in the process of growth, development, renewal, directed change, perfection.
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.
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.
What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself.
The clock, moreover, is a piece of power-machinery whose 'product' is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.
Perhaps our age will be known to the future historian as the age of the bulldozer and the exterminator; and in many parts of the country the building of a highway has about the same result upon vegetation and human structures as the passage of a tornado or the blast of an atom bomb.
Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.
