Lewis Mumford Quotes & Sayings

Even under more ingratiating conditions than rocket travel, this new conquest has already disclosed drawbacks quite as remarkable as its advantages. On a transcontinental flight by a jet plane approaching super-sonic speed, the actual trip is so cramped, so dull, so vacuous, that the only attraction the air lines dare to offer are those vulgar experiences one can have by walking to the nearest cabaret, restaurant, or cinema: liquor, food, motion pictures, luscious stewardesses. Only a lurking sense of fear and the possibility of a grisly death help restore the sense of reality. — Lewis Mumford

The convenience of timekeeping is greatly overrated; and the people who practice it so faithfully that they lose the capacity for appreciating the fixed and the static and the spatially related experiences cut themselves off from a good part of reality. — Lewis Mumford

When cities were first founded, an old Egyptian scribe tells us, the mission of the founder was to 'put gods in their shrines.' The task of the coming city is not essentially different: its mission is to put the highest concerns of man at the center of all his activities. — Lewis Mumford

For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old. — Lewis Mumford

It was Stieglitz's endeavor ... to translate the unseen world of tactile values as they develop between lovers not merely into the sexual act but the entire relation of two personalities - to translate this world of blind touch into sight. — Lewis Mumford

Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense. — Lewis Mumford

The very people who shudder over the cruelty of the hunter are apt to forget that slaughter, in the grimmest sense of the word, is a process they entrust daily to the butcher; and that unlike the game of the forests, even the dumbest creatures of the slaughterhouse know what is in store for them. — Lewis Mumford

In short, the oppressor and the oppressed, instead of fighting it out within the city, directed their aggression toward a common goal-an attack on a rival city. Thus the greater the tensions and the harsher the daily repressions of civilization, the more useful war became as a safety valve. Finally, war performed another function that was even more indispensable, if my hypothetical connection between anxiety, human sacrifice, and war prove defensible. War provided its own justification, by displacing neurotic anxiety with rational fear in the face of real danger. Once war broke out, there was solid reason for apprehension, terror, and compensatory displays of courage. — Lewis Mumford

In vulgar usage, progress has come to mean limitless movement in space and time, accompanied, necessarily, by an equally limitless command of energy: culminating in limitless destruction. — Lewis Mumford

Happiness, I think, lies on the surface ... when one plunges under the surface all the buoyant things disappear, and the farther down one gets the more cold and dark it seems: and the more oppressive space feels. — Lewis Mumford

Thus anxiety invited appeasement by magical sacrifice: human sacrifice led to man-hunting raids: one-sided raids turned into armed combat and mutual strife between rival powers. So ever larger numbers of people with more effective weapons were drawn into this dreadful ceremony, and what was at first an incidental prelude to a token sacrifice itself became the 'supreme sacrifice,' performed en masse. this ideological aberration was the final contribution to the perfection of the military megamachine, for the ability to wage war and to impose collective human sacrifice has remained the identifying mark of all sovereign power throughout history. — Lewis Mumford

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

We must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to the expression of moral and aesthetic values as we now give to science, to invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent. — Lewis Mumford

Our megatechnic culture, based as it is on the strange supposition that subjective malice has no reality and that evils do not exist, except in the sense of reparable mechanical defects, has proved itself incompetent to take on such responsibilities. — Lewis Mumford

A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life. — Lewis Mumford

The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it. — Lewis Mumford

We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end. — Lewis Mumford

What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself — Lewis Mumford

The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city. — Lewis Mumford

Less than a decade after the explosion of the first atom bomb the megamachine had expanded to a point where it began to dominate key areas of the whole economy of the United States: its system of control reached beyond the airfields, the rocket sites, the bomb factories, the universities, to a hundred other related areas, tying the once separate and independent enterprises to a central organization whose irrational and humanly subversive policies ensured the still further expansion of the megamachine. Financial subventions, research grants, educational subsidies, all worked unceasingly for the 'Life, Prosperity, Health' of the new rulers, headed by Goliaths in brass armor bellowing threats of defiance and destruction at the entire world. In a short time, the original military-industrial-scientific elite became the supreme Pentagon of Power, for it incorporated likewise both the bureaucratic and the educational establishments. — Lewis Mumford

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society. — Lewis Mumford

Don't take the will for the deed; get the deed. — Lewis Mumford

Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers. — Lewis Mumford

He who touches the soil of Manhattan and the pavement of New York, touches, whenever he knows or not, Walt Whitman. — Lewis Mumford

The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression. — Lewis Mumford

Man's Chief purpose ... is the creation and preservation of values; that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life. — Lewis Mumford

A Society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure and to another all the burdens of work condemns both classes to spiritual sterility. — Lewis Mumford

Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food. — Lewis Mumford

Safety razors make it hard to grow beards in America: America would be a better place if there were a few bearded, savage, terrible old men. — Lewis Mumford

The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon. — Lewis Mumford

The last step in parental love involves the release of the beloved; the willing cutting of the cord that would otherwise keep the child in a state of emotional dependence. — Lewis Mumford

As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used - as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts - to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera. — Lewis Mumford

The self holds both a hell and a heaven. — Lewis Mumford

But we must not overlook the vital connection between all physical movement and the acquisition of speech, for this has now been established independently by psychologists. In the case of children whose speech has been retarded or has become disordered, they have found that the child's ability to handle words can be recovered by re-training his motor behavior through inducing him to resume the earlier posture of crawling, the stage that usually accompanies, or slightly precedes, the first efforts at speech. — Lewis Mumford

I'm a pessimist about probabilities; I'm an optimist about possibilities. — Lewis Mumford

Order and creativity are complementary. — Lewis Mumford

Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past. — Lewis Mumford

Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one. — Lewis Mumford

Kings have always boasted that their slightest wishes were commands. The classic proof of their power and their success was their command of limitless amounts of food and drink, limitless quantities of clothes and jewels: the services of innumerable slaves, servants, and officials: limitless sensual stimulations, and not least, limitless opportunities for sexual intercourse, for even here erotic delight was measured in gross quantitative terms. The affluence that once was monopolized by the king and his court is now being held up as the ultimate gift of the power system to mankind at large. — Lewis Mumford

To the extent that the scientist's capacity for pursuing the truth depends upon costly apparatus, institutional collaboration and heavy capital investment by government or industry he is no longer his own master. — Lewis Mumford

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

Every transformation of humanity has rested upon deep stirrings and intuitions, whose rationalized expression takes the form of a new picture of the cosmos and the nature of the human. — Lewis Mumford

Only when love takes the lead will the earth, and life on earth, be safe again. And not until then. — Lewis Mumford

Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further development. — Lewis Mumford

Geneva has the sleepy tidiness of a man who combs his hair while yet in his pyjamas. — Lewis Mumford

Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences. — Lewis Mumford

Organic planning does not begin with a preconceived goal; it moves from need to need, from opportunity to opportunity, in a series of adaptations that themselves become increasingly coherent and purposeful, so that they generate a complex final design, hardly less unified than a pre-formed geometric pattern. — Lewis Mumford

The earth is the Lord's fullness thereof: this is no longer a hollow dictum of religion, but a directive for economic action toward human brotherhood. — Lewis Mumford

The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created. — Lewis Mumford

(The processes are) doubly ruinous: they impoverish the earth by hastily removing, for the benefit of a few generations, the common resources which, once expended and dissipated, can never be restored; and second, in its technique, its habits, its processes, the paleotechnic period is equally inimical to the earth considered as a human habitat, by its destruction of the beauty of the landscape, its ruining of streams, its pollution of drinking water, its filling the air with a finely divided carboniferous deposit, which chokes both life and vegetation. — Lewis Mumford

In our entrancement with the motorcar, we have forgotten how much more efficient and how much more flexible the footwalker is. — Lewis Mumford

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity. — Lewis Mumford

Bureaucratic regimentation was in fact part of the larger regimentation of life, introduced by this power-centered culture. Nothing emerges more clearly from the Pyramid Texts themselves, with their wearisome repetitions of formulae, than a colossal capacity for enduring monotony: a capacity that anticipates the peak of universal boredom achieved in our own day. This verbal compulsiveness is the psychal side of the systematic general compulsion that brought the labor machine into existence. Only those who were sufficiently docile to endure this regimen-or sufficiently infantile to enjoy it-at every stage from command to execution could become efficient units in the human machine. — Lewis Mumford

The mighty cultural heroes and kings who fabricated the megamachine and performed these tasks, from Gilgamesh and Imhotep to Sargon and Alexander the Great, roused their contemporaries from a sluggish passive acceptance of cramped, 'natural limits': they called upon them to 'plan the impossible.' And when the work was done, that which had seemed impossible of human performance had, in fact, been realized. From around 3,500 B.C. on, nothing that men could imagine seemed to lie entirely beyond the reach of royal power. — 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 earlier civilizations have ever fathomed. — Lewis Mumford

Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal." Even more unfortunately, the industries that are favored by such expansion must, to maintain their output, be devoted to goods that are readily consumable either by their nature, or because they are so shoddily fabricated that they must soon be replaced. By fashion and built-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale. — Lewis Mumford

Integration proceeds by just the opposite route: a deliberate heightening of every organic function; a release of impulses from circumstances that irrationally thwarted them; richer and more complex patterns of activity; an esthetic heightening of anticipated realizations; a steady lengthening of the future; a faith in cosmic perspectives. — Lewis Mumford

Ritual, art, poesy, drama, music, dance, philosophy, science, myth, religion are all as essential to man as his daily bread: man's true life consists not alone in the work activities that directly sustain him, but in the symbolic activities which give significance both to the processes of work and their ultimate products and consummations. — Lewis Mumford

War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing. — Lewis Mumford

Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet. — Lewis Mumford

Faith in the creative process, in the dynamics of emergence, in the values and purposes that transcend past achievements and past forms, is the precondition of all further growth. — Lewis Mumford

The final goal of human effort is man's self-transforma tion. — Lewis Mumford

Each one of us, as long as life stirs is us, may play a part in extricating ourselves from the power system by asserting our primacy as people in quiet acts of mental or physical withdrawal-in gestures of non-conformity, in abstentions, restrictions, inhibitions, which will liberate us from the domination of the pentagon of power. — Lewis Mumford

Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence. — Lewis Mumford

It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man's principal toy and tool: without the meanings and values it sustains, all man's other tools would be worthless. — Lewis Mumford

To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity. — Lewis Mumford

Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act. — Lewis Mumford

The Fujiyama of Architecture?at once a lofty mountain and a national shrine. — Lewis Mumford

Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities. — Lewis Mumford

While a great many other ideas and measures are of prime importance for the good life of the community, that which concerns its architectural expression is the notion of the community as limited in numbers, and in area ... To express these relations clearly, to embody them in buildings and roads and gardens in which each individual structure will be subordinated to the whole - this is the end of community planning. — Lewis Mumford

A picture was once a rare sort of symbol, rare enough to call for attentive concentration. Now it is the actual experience that is rare, and the picture has become ubiquitous. — Lewis Mumford

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf — Lewis Mumford

In hunting and agriculture work had been a sacred function, one of collaborating with the forces of nature, and invoking the gods of fertility and organic abundance to countenance with their favor the efforts of the human community: pious exaltation and cosmic wonder mingled with strenuous muscular exercise and meticulous ritual. But for those who were drafted into the megamachine, work ceased to be a sacred function, willingly performed, with many pleasurable rewards in both the act and its fruition: it became a curse. — Lewis Mumford

Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline. — Lewis Mumford

Do you want to know what I most regret about my youth? That I didn't dream more boldly and demand of myself more impossible things; for all one does in maturity is to carve in granite or porphyry the soap bubble one blew in youth! Oh to have dreamed harder! — Lewis Mumford

Each person is a temporary focus of forces, vitalities, and values that carry back to an immemorial past and that reach forward into an unthinkable future. — Lewis Mumford

Nothing about his life is more strange to [man] or more unaccountable in purely mundane terms than the stirrings he finds in himself, usually fitful but sometimes overwhelming, to look beyond his animal existence and not be fully satisfied with its immediate substance. He lacks the complacency of the other animals: he is obsessed by pride and guilt, pride at being something more than a mere animal, built at falling short of the high aims he sets for himself. — Lewis Mumford

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

The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live. — Lewis Mumford

Life is an art we are required to practice without preparation, a score that we play at sight even before we have mastered our instruments. — Lewis Mumford

Common sense was exactly what kingship, almost by definition, lacked: when the king's orders were executed no one dared to tell him honestly how they had turned out. With the absolute powers bestowed by kingship came an arrogance, a ruthlessness, an inflexibility, a habit of compulsion, an unwillingness to listen to reason, that no small community would have endured from any of its members-though the aggressive and humanly disagreeable qualities that make for such ambitious leadership might be found anywhere-as Margaret Mead discovered among the Mundugumor, whose leaders were known to the community as "really bad men," aggressive, gluttonous for power and prestige. — Lewis Mumford

Stieglitz conceived, though he never carried out, a series of photographs of the heads of stallions and mares, of bulls and cows, in the act of mating, hoping to catch in the brute an essential quality that would symbolize the probably unattainable photograph of a passionate human mating. — Lewis Mumford

In short, none of the destructive fantasies that have taken possession of leaders in our own age, from Kemal Ataturk to Stalin, from the Khans of the Kremlin to the Kahns of the Pentagon, were foreign to the souls of the divinely appointed founders of the first machine civilization. With every increase of effective power, extravagantly sadistic and murderous impulses erupted out of the unconscious. This is the trauma that has distorted the subsequent development of all 'civilized' societies. And it is this fact that punctuates the entire history of mankind with outbursts of collective paranoia and tribal delusions of grandeur, mingled with malevolent suspicions, murderous hatreds, and atrociously inhumane acts. — Lewis Mumford

In short, conquest is in no sense a necessary sign of higher human development, though conquistadors have always thought otherwise. Any valid concept of organic development must use the primary terms of ecology-cooperation and symbiosis-as well as struggle and conflict, for even predators are part of a food chain, and do not 'conquer' their prey except to eat them. The idea of total conquest is an extrapolation from the existing power system: it indicates, not a desirable end, accomodation, but a pathological aberration, re-enforced by such rewards as this system bestows. As for the climactic notion that "the universe will be man's at last"-what is this but a paranoid fantasy, comparable to the claims of an asylum inmate who imagines that he is Emperor of the World? Such a claim is countless light-years away from reality. — Lewis Mumford

In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer. — Lewis Mumford

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 one realizes that keeps existence from being vain and trivial. — Lewis Mumford

The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture. — Lewis Mumford

If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul. — Lewis Mumford

A multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to the common mold. — Lewis Mumford

Before modern man can gain control over the forces that now threaten his very existence, he must resume possession of himself. This sets the chief mission for the city of the future: that of creating a visible regional and civic structure, designed to make man at home with his deeper self and his larger world, attached to images of human nature and love. — Lewis Mumford

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

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 milieu might be it was soon reduced by reason of the soot and cinders that accompanied its activities, to its characteristic tones, grey, dirty-brown, black. — Lewis Mumford

Primitive man's life in Hobbes' famous words, was short, brutish, and nasty; and this very savagery and anxiety became the justification for an absolute order established, like Descartes' ideal world, by a single providential mind and will: that of the absolute ruler or monarch. Until men were incorporated into Leviathan, that is, the all-powerful state through which the king's will was carried out, they were dangerous to their fellows and a burden to themselves. — Lewis Mumford

Richter compares the conditions of rat domestication with those now provided by the 'Welfare State'-ample food, no danger, no stress, uniform environment and climate, and so forth. But he notes that, under these seemingly favorable conditions, organic deterioration has taken place: a decrease in the size of the adrenal glands, which help the organism meet stress or fatigue and forfend certain diseases: while the thyroid gland, the regulator of metabolism, becomes less active. Not strangely, perhaps, the brains of the domestic rat, and perhaps their mental ability, are smaller. At the same time, the sex glands mature earlier, become bigger, show more activity, and result in a higher rate of fertility. How human! — Lewis Mumford

On any pure theory of causality or statistical probability, organization would be completely improbable without the external aid of a divine organizer. — Lewis Mumford

In its revolt against congestion and sordor, a space-hungry generation has, I fear, developed eyes that are bigger than its stomach. — Lewis Mumford

Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century. — Lewis Mumford

Chaos, if it does not harden into a pattern of disorder, may be more fruitful than a regularity too easily accepted and a success too easily achieved. — Lewis Mumford

If one single invention was necessary to make this larger mechanism operative for constructive tasks as well as for coercion, it was probably the invention of writing. This method of translating speech into graphic record not merely made it possible to transmit impulses and messages throughout the system, but to fix accountability when written orders were not carried out. Accountability and the written word both went along historically with the control of large numbers; and it is no accident that the earliest uses of writing were not to convey ideas, religious or otherwise, but to keep temple records of grain, cattle, pottery, fabricated goods, stored and disbursed. This happened early, for a pre-dynastic Narmer mace in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford records the taking of 120,000 prisoners, 400,000 oxen, and 1,422,000 goats. The arithmetical reckoning was an even greater feat than the capture. — Lewis Mumford

The fact that order and creativity are complementary has been basic to man's cultural development; for he has to internalize order to be able to give external form to his creativity. — Lewis Mumford