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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 Philosophers of the Earth : Conversations with Ecologists (1972)

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More quotes by Lewis Mumford

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)

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Ill can he rule the great, that cannot reach the small.

Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene (1589)

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.

James Madison

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

Leon Trotsky The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

John Adams

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Lewis Mumford (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.