64 quotes
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.
Philosophers of the Earth : Conversations with Ecologists (1972)
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.
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 (1930)
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.
The City in History (1961)
Under capitalism time-keeping is not merely a means of co-ordinating and inter-relating complicated functions: it is also like money an independent commodity with a value of its own.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
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?
Today our world faces a crisis: a crisis which, if its consequences are as grave as now seems, may not fully be resolved for another century.
The Culture of Cities (1938)
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.
The City in History (1961)
The machine itself ... is a human product, and its very abstractions make it more definitely human in one sense than those human arts which on occasion realistically counterfit nature.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
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.
The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression.
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.
Faith for Living (1940)
New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
My Works and Days (1979)
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.
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.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
When the organism dies, the brain dies, too, with all its lifetime accumulations. But the mind reproduces itself by transmitting its symbols to other intermediaries, human and mechanical, than the particular brain that first assembled them.
Interpretations and Forecasts 1922-1972 (1973)
Mechanization and regimentation are not new phenomena in history: what is new is the fact that these functions have been projected and embodied in organized form which dominate every aspect of our existence.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
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.
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.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.
Interpretations and Forecasts 1922-1972 (1973)