Lewis Mumford

Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.

— Lewis Mumford

War is a specific product of civilization.

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

Don't take the will for the deed; get the deed.

— Lewis Mumford

I'm a pessimist about probabilities; I'm an optimist about possibilities.

— Lewis Mumford

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

— Lewis Mumford

Each person is a temporary focus of forces, vitalities, and values that carry back to an immemorial past and that reach forward…

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

The artist does not illustrate science (but) he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does.

— Lewis Mumford

Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

The artist has a special task and duty... reminding people of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations…

— Lewis Mumford

Virtue is not a chemical product... it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease…

— Lewis Mumford

It was Stieglitz's endeavor... to translate the unseen world of tactile values as they develop between lovers not merely into the sexual…

— Lewis Mumford

Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against…

— Lewis Mumford

When vitality runs high, death takes men by surprise. But if they close their eyes to this possibility, what they gain in…

— Lewis Mumford

Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has…

— Lewis Mumford

We must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to the expression of moral and esthetic values as…

— Lewis Mumford

The artist does not illustrate science; ... [but] he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does, and expresses by…

— Lewis Mumford

“To understand the dominating role played by technics in modern civilization….one must explain the culture that was ready to use them and…

— Lewis Mumford

“The earth itself was but a mean stopping place, a wayside tavern of ill fame, on the way to these other worlds.…

— Lewis Mumford

Iron and coal dominated everywhere, from grey to black: the black boots, the black stove-pipe hat, the black coach or carriage, the…

— Lewis Mumford

Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the…

— Lewis Mumford

“Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations, threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under…

— Lewis Mumford

The philosophers of industrialism, from Bacon to Bentham, from Smith to Marx, insisted that the improvement of man's condition was the highest…

— Lewis Mumford

The life-efficiency and adaptability of the computer must be questioned. Its judicious use depends upon the availability of its human employers quite…

— Lewis Mumford

Before modern man can gain control over the forces that now threaten his very existence, he must resume possession of himself. This…

— Lewis Mumford

However far modern science and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson; nothing…

— Lewis Mumford

The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

War is both the product of an earlier corruption, and a producer of new corruptions.

— Lewis Mumford

Chaos, if it does not harden into a pattern of disorder, may be more fruitful than a regularity too easily accepted and…

— Lewis Mumford

Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.

— Lewis Mumford

What plethora of material goods can possibly atone for a waking life so humanly belittling, if not degrading, as the push-button tasks…

— Lewis Mumford

A Society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure and to another all the burdens of work condemns both…

— Lewis Mumford