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Lewis Mumford Quotes

1895–1990 United States

Lewis Mumford (19 October 1895 – 26 January 1990) was an American historian of technology and science, also noted for his study of cities.

United States
Academics
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Also known as: Mumford, Lewis

Random Lewis Mumford quote

64 quotes

Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.

The Culture of Cities (1938)

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 City in History (1961)

Nothing is permanent: certainly not the frozen images of barbarous power with which fascism now confronts us.

The Culture of Cities (1938)

The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.

Technics and Civilization (1934)

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.

In the Name of Sanity (1954)

Each religion is a brave guess at the authorship of Hamlet.

My Works and Days (1979)

Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.

The Culture of Cities (1938)

Let us confess it: the human situation is always desperate.

In the Name of Sanity (1954)

However far modern science and technics have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson: Nothing is impossible.

Technics and Civilization (1934)

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!"

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

Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.

Technics and Civilization (1934)

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

Technics and Civilization (1934)

Here was my city, immense, overpowering, flooded with energy and light...

Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford (1982)

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

My Works and Days (1979)

The incentive to mechanization lay in the greater profits that could be extracted through the multiplied and efficiency of the machine.

Technics and Civilization (1934)

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.

Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal."

The City in History (1961)

Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.

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?

The Myth of the Machine (1967)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Lewis Mumford (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.