City Quote by Lewis Mumford

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

Lewis Mumford

About This Quote

Source Book: The City in History, 1961

Advocates replacing car-centric design with spaces that foster love and community.

In simple terms: Build cities for people, not cars.

Key Takeaway

Prioritize human connections in urban planning.

Themes

urbanism community humanism

Mood

reflective optimistic

Type

philosophical visionary

When to use this quote

urban planning
community festivals
neighborhood development

Key Concepts

city design social spaces sustainability

Questions to Reflect On

What designs encourage intimacy?
How can cars coexist with community spaces?

A Different Perspective

May overlook practical transport needs.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 3.0 out of 5 (10 ratings)

More 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

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

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

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

Image

The self holds both a hell and a heaven.

Lewis Mumford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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