Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence. — 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… — 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… — Lewis Mumford Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The mind reproduces itself by transmitting its symbols to other intermediaries, human and mechanical, than the particular brain that first assembled them. — Lewis Mumford Copy Share Image
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
Above all we need, particularly as children, the reassuring presence of a visible community, an intimate group that enfolds us with understanding… — Lewis Mumford Copy Share Image
Stieglitz conceived, though he never carried out, a series of photographs of the heads of stallions and mares, of bulls and cows,… — Lewis Mumford Copy Share Image
Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the… — Lewis Mumford Copy Share Image
Before modern man can gain control over the forces that now threaten his very existence, he must resume possession of himself. This… — Lewis Mumford Copy Share Image
(The processes are) doubly ruinous: they impoverish the earth by hastily removing, for the benefit of a few generations, the common resources… — Lewis Mumford Copy Share Image
Every transformation of humanity has rested upon deep stirrings and intuitions, whose rationalized expression takes the form of a new picture of… — Lewis Mumford Copy Share Image
If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise… — Lewis Mumford Copy Share Image
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 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… — Lewis Mumford Copy Share Image
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… — Lewis Mumford Copy Share Image
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
