22 Quotes by Lewis Mumford
- The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
- Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.
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