What plethora of material goods can possibly atone for a waking life so humanly belittling, if not degrading, as the push-button tasks left to human performers? — Lewis Mumford Copy Share Image
The philosophers of industrialism, from Bacon to Bentham, from Smith to Marx, insisted that the improvement of man's condition was the highest requirement of morality. But in what did the improvement consist? The answer seemed so obvious to them that… — 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
