Quotes by Lewis Mumford

• The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
• 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.
• War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
• Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
• Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.
• Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.
• To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 artist does not illustrate science (but) he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does.
• Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.
• Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
• A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.
• 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.
• One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.
• Don't take the will for the deed; get the deed.
• Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
• 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.
• However far modern science and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson; nothing is impossible.
• 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.
• A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.
• 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.
• New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
• 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.
• Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.