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…

— 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

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

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…

— 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

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

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

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

— 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…

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

Stieglitz conceived, though he never carried out, a series of photographs of the heads of stallions and mares, of bulls and cows,…

— 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

Everyone aimed at security: no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before the barbarian invasions had done their work, long…

— Lewis Mumford

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

— 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

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

— Lewis Mumford

In vulgar usage, progress has come to mean limitless movement in space and time, accompanied, necessarily, by an equally limitless command of…

— Lewis Mumford

One's worst enormities remain within, and it is only one's vulgar commonplaces of error and folly that turn into murders and suicides,…

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford