Lewis Mumford Quotes

Quotes about:

• Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.

  Lewis Mumford

  Obesity, Lanes, Traffic

  44 Copy quote

• The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans.

  Lewis Mumford

  Ideas, Justice, Diversity

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Lewis Mumford

  Beauty, Truth, Sight

  36 Copy quote

• Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.

  Lewis Mumford

  Men, Self, Discipline

  21 Copy quote

• Trend is not destiny.

  Lewis Mumford

  Destiny, Trends

  Lewis Mumford (1928). “Architecture as a home for man: essays for architectural record”

  4 Copy quote

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

  Lewis Mumford

  Courage, Men, Needs

  29 Copy quote

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

  Lewis Mumford

  Cities, Car, Lovers

  "My Works and Days". Book by Lewis Mumford, 1979.

  28 Copy quote

• A picture was once a rare sort of symbol, rare enough to call for attentive concentration. Now it is the actual experience that is rare, and the picture has become ubiquitous.

  Lewis Mumford

  Enough, Concentration, Symbols

  8 Copy quote

• A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility.

  Lewis Mumford

  Spiritual, Opportunity, Class

  "Faith for Living". Book by Lewis Mumford, 1940.

  8 Copy quote

• The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

  Lewis Mumford

  Running, Art, Nature

  "The Culture of Cities". Book by Lewis Mumford. Introduction, 1938.

  17 Copy quote

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

  Lewis Mumford

  Travel, Mean, Cooking

  25 Copy quote

• Organic planning does not begin with a preconceived goal; it moves from need to need, from opportunity to opportunity, in a series of adaptations that themselves become increasingly coherent and purposeful, so that they generate a complex final design, hardly less unified than a pre-formed geometric pattern.

  Lewis Mumford

  Moving, Opportunity, Goal

  LEWIS MUMFORD (1961). “THE CITY IN HISTORY”

  6 Copy quote

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

  Lewis Mumford

  Inspirational, Life, Dream

  Lewis Mumford (1928). “The Story of Utopias”, p.8, Library of Alexandria

  55 Copy quote

• 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.

  Lewis Mumford

  Technology, Arbitrary, Novelty

  9 Copy quote

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

  Lewis Mumford

  Inspirational, Motivational, Courage

  70 Copy quote

• Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.

  Lewis Mumford

  Architecture, Prophecy, Tombs

  Lewis Mumford (1975). “Findings and keepings: analects for an autobiography”, Not Avail

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Lewis Mumford

  Color, Goal, Personality

  58 Copy quote

• 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.

  Lewis Mumford

  Art, Creativity, Cities

  "The City in History". Book by Lewis Mumford. Chapter 18, 1961.

  23 Copy quote

• Only when love takes the lead will the earth, and life on earth, be safe again. And not until then.

  Lewis Mumford

  Earth, Safe

  William L. Thomas, William L. Thomas (Jr.), Carl Ortwin Sauer, Lewis Mumford (1956). “Man's role in changi”

  4 Copy quote

• When cities were first founded, an old Egyptian scribe tells us, the mission of the founder was to 'put gods in their shrines.' The task of the coming city is not essentially different: its mission is to put the highest concerns of man at the center of all his activities.

  Lewis Mumford

  Men, Cities, Different

  21 Copy quote

• The life-efficiency and adaptability of the computer must be questioned. Its judicious use depends upon the availability of its human employers quite literally to keep their own heads, not merely to scrutinize the programming but to reserve for themselves the right of ultimate decision. No automatic system can be intelligently run byautomatonsor by people who dare not assert human intuition, human autonomy, human purpose.

  Lewis Mumford

  Running, Availability, People

  1970 TheMyth of theMachine.

  11 Copy quote

• The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city.

  Lewis Mumford

  Cities, Age, Building

  Lewis Mumford (1964). “The High Way and the City”, New American Library of Canada

  14 Copy quote

• The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.

  Lewis Mumford

  Mystery, Consciousness, Life Is

  16 Copy quote

• 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.

  Lewis Mumford

  Order, Issues, Finals

  "The Conduct Of Life". Book by Lewis Mumford. Chapter: "The Fulfillment of Man", 1951.

  14 Copy quote

• For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old.

  Lewis Mumford

  Mean, Progress, Accepting What Is

  Lewis Mumford (1963). “The highway and the city: essays”

  8 Copy quote

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