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Lewis Mumford

66 quotes

“It is our utopias that make the world tolerable to us: the cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) first seen 1922 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Story of Utopias, Chapter One (1922).
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Origins of the American Mind" in The Golden Day (1926).
“(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 (1895–1990) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Theory and Practice of Regionalism" in The Sociological Review, vol. 20, nos. 1 and 2, 1928.
“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.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) first seen 1930 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Drama of the Machines" in Scribner's Magazine (August 1930)
“Modern industrial design is based on the principle of conspicuous economy [but] the bourgeois culture which dominates the Western World is founded... on the principle of conspicuous waste.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) first seen 1930 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lewis Mumford (1930) Modern American design. R.L. Leonard, & ‎C.A. Glassgold (eds.), ‎American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen. p. 9; As cited in: V.T. Clayton et al. Drawing on America's Past, p. 28
“Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) first seen 1865 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America, 1865-1895 (1931), p. 3
“Virtue is not a chemical product, as Taine once described it: it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key. That, I submit, is what has happened in our own lifetime.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Values for Survival (1946)
“Let us confess it: the human situation is always desperate.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In the Name of Sanity (1954)
“Today, all the normal mischances of living have been multiplied, a million-fold, by the potentialities for destruction, for an unthinking act of collective suicide, which man's very triumphs in science and invention have brought about. In this situation the artist has a special task and duty: the task of reminding men of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In the Name of Sanity (1954)
“I'm a pessimist about probabilities, I'm an optimist about possibilities.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Lewis Mumford Remembers" by Carey Winfrey in The New York Times (6 July 1977)
“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!”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Address to the National Book Awards Committee, published in My Works and Days (1979)
“Here was my city, immense, overpowering, flooded with energy and light... The world, at that moment , opened before me, challenging me, beckoning me, demanding something of me that it would take more than a lifetime to give, but raising all my energies by its own vivid promise to a higher pitch.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford (1982), p. 130
“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 (1895–1990) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Philosophers of the Earth : Conversations with Ecologists (1972) by Anne Chisholm
“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.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Planning for the Phases of Life", The Urban Prospect: Essays (1968)
“The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bloodshed kept pace with iron production: in essence, the entire paleotechnic period was ruled, from beginning to end, by the policy of blood and iron. The brutal contempt for life was equalled only by the almost priestly ritual it developed for inflicting death. Its "peace" was indeed the peace that passeth understanding: what was it but latent warfare.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That was the danger Samuel Butler jestingly prophesied in Erewhon, the danger that the human being might become a means whereby the machine perpetuated itself and extended its dominion.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On one side is the gigantic printing press, a miracle of fine articulation, which turns out the tabloid newspaper: on the other side are the contents of the tabloid itself, symbolically recording the most crude and elementary states of emotion.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“However far modern science and technics have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson: Nothing is impossible.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing is permanent: certainly not the frozen images of barbarous power with which fascism now confronts us. Those images may easily be smashed by an external shock, cracked as ignominiously as the fallen Dagon, the massive idol of the heathen; or they may be melted, eventually, by the internal warmth of normal men and women. Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal. As life becomes insurgent once more in our civilization, conquering the reckless thrust of barbarism, the culture of cities will be both instrument and goal.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...in general, the traditionalists are backward-looking, conservative; pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Often quoted as "Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.", e.g, Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 112.
“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.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The individual contribution, the work of any single generation, is infinitesimal; the power and glory belong to human society at large, and are the long result of selection, conservation, sacrifice, creation, and renewal — the outcome of endless brave efforts to conserve values and ideas, and to hand them on to posterity, along with physical life itself. Each person is a temporary focus of forces, vitalities, and values that carry back into an immemorial past and that reach forward into an unthinkable future.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fundamental values of a true community are elsewhere: in love, poetry, disinterested thought, the free use of the imagination, the pursuit of non-utilitarian activities, the production of non-profitmaking goods, the employment of non-consumable wealth - here are the sustaining values of a living culture.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A community whose life is not irrigated by art and science, by religion and philosophy, day upon day, is a community that exists half alive.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The aggregation of the spiritual life from the practical life is a curse that falls impartially upon both sides of our existence. 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 (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps never before have the peoples of the world been so close to losing the very core of their humanity; for of what use are cosmic energies, if they are handled by disoriented and demoralized men?”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We arrest our inner creativity with external compulsions and irrelevant anxieties, at the mercy of constant interruptions by telephone and radio and insistent print, timing our lives to the movement of a production belt we do not control. At the same time, we give authority to the stomach, the muscles, the genitals--to animal reflexes that produce obedient consumers, whip-wielding man-trainers, slavish political subjects, push-button automatons.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thus the inertia of "progress" today leads swiftly downhill; while the attempt while the attempt to achieve stabilization by collective compulsion and social arrest likewise leads to the same destination--death. Only one road lies open to those who would remain human: the road of renewal. Each one of us must dedicate himself, at whatever effort, with whatever willing sacrifice, to such a transformation of himself and all the groups and associations of in which he participates, as will lead to law and order, to peace and cooperation, to love and brotherhood, throughout the planet.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal." Even more unfortunately, the industries that are favored by such expansion must, to maintain their output, be devoted to goods that are readily consumable either by their nature, or because they are so shoddily fabricated that they must soon be replaced. By fashion and built-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This essential coalition between royal military power and often dubious supernatural authority anticipated a similar alliance between the scientists and mathematical games theorists with the higher agents of government today, and was subject to similar corruptions, miscalculations, and hallucinations.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If, as many anthropologists still hold, the making and using of tools as one of the chief sources of primitive man's intellectual development, is it not time that we asked ourselves what will happen to man if he departs as completely as he now threatens to do from his primal polytechnic occupations? Since they can no longer be pursued at a profit, perhaps they will have to be restored as modes of sport and recreation, even more as helpful — increasingly essential — forms of personal service and mutual aid.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the elemental emotions of fear and rage associated with the most primitive parts of the brain, this swift response without conscious intervention or direction is a condition of survival: but something more than survival comes forth from it; for this very automatism freed the growing brain and ramifying nervous system for more important services, detached from the immediate pressure for survival, performed by the new brain. Here by his conscious symbolic activities man created a second realm that conforms more closely to his higher personal and social needs.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The physical lot of surviving workers had notably improved, with unemployment insurance, social security, and the new health services, while their children's school education was assured by the government-operated schools: in addition, they had, for intellectual or emotional stimulus and diversion, the radio and the television. But the work itself was no longer as various, as interesting, or as sustaining to the personality...”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In my own household, for example, an electric refrigerator has been in service for nineteen years, with only a single minor repair: an admirable job. Both automatic refrigerators for daily use and deepfreeze preservation are inventions of permanent value. Though one cannot bestow any such unqualified commendation upon the design of the contemporary motor car, one can hardly doubt that if biotechnic criteria were heeded, rather than those of market analysts and fashion experts, an equally good product might come forth from Detroit, with an equally long prospect of continued use.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What plethora of material goods can possibly atone for a waking life so humanly belittling, if not degrading, as the push-button tasks left to human performers?”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As opposed to [megatechnics], an organic system directs itself to qualitative richness, amplitude, spaciousness, free from quantitative pressure and crowding, since self-regulation, self-correction, and self-propulsion are as much an integral property of organisms as nutrition, reproduction, growth, and repair. Balance, wholeness, completeness, continuous interplay between inner and outer, the subjective and the objective aspects of existence are identifying characteristics of the organic model; and the general name for an economy based on such a model is an economy of plenitude.”
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source