City Quotes by Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the…

— Lewis Mumford

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

— 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 black iron…

— Lewis Mumford

The self holds both a hell and a heaven.

— Lewis Mumford

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…

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

Adventure is humdrum and routine unless one assimilates it, unless one relates it to a central core which grows within and gives it contour…

— Lewis Mumford

Safety razors make it hard to grow beards in America: America would be a better place if there were a few bearded, savage, terrible…

— Lewis Mumford

A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to…

— Lewis Mumford

Without leisure there can be neither art nor science nor fine conversation, nor any ceremonious performance of the offices of love and friendship.

— Lewis Mumford

Not sense data or atoms or electrons or packets of energy, but purposes, interests, and meanings, constitute the underlying facts of human experience.

— Lewis Mumford

When cities were first founded, an old Egyptian scribe tells us, the mission of the founder was to 'put gods in their shrines.' The…

— Lewis Mumford

“Forget the damned motor car and built cities for lovers and friends .”

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford