Man's Chief purpose is the creation and preservation of values; that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in… — Lewis Mumford Copy Share Image
In the name of economy a thousand wasteful devices would be invented; and in the name of efficiency new forms of mechanical time-wasting would be devised: both processes gained speed through the nineteenth century and have come close to the limit of extravagant futility in our own time. But labor-saving devices could only achieve their end-that of freeing mankind for… — Lewis Mumford Copy Share
Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal." — Lewis Mumford Copy Share Image
By fashion and built-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by… — Lewis Mumford Copy Share Image
Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal." Even… — Lewis Mumford Copy Share Image
Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities. — Lewis Mumford Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 frame of the hearth, the black cooking pots and pans and stoves. Was it a mourning? Was it protective coloration? Was it mere depression of the senses? No matter what the original color of the paleotechnic… — Lewis Mumford Copy Share
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Adventure is humdrum and routine unless one assimilates it, unless one relates it to a central core which grows within and gives it contour and significance. Raw experience is empty, just as empty as the forecastle of a whaler as in a chamber of a counting house; for it is not what one does, but in a manifold sense, what… — Lewis Mumford Copy Share
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
