Lewis Mumford Quotes - Page 2

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• Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training...

  Lewis Mumford

  Life, Art, Practice

  "The Conduct Of Life". Book by Lewis Mumford, 1951.

  23 Copy quote

• The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.

  Lewis Mumford

  Memories, Men, Cities

  9 Copy quote

• Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.

  Lewis Mumford

  Inspirational, Funny, Humor

  Lewis Mumford (1979). “My works and days: a personal chronicle”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

  13 Copy quote

• The life-efficiency and adaptability of the computer must be questioned. Its judicious use depends upon the availability of its human employers quite literally to keep their own heads, not merely to scrutinize the programming but to reserve for themselves the right of ultimate decision. No automatic system can be intelligently run byautomatonsor by people who dare not assert human intuition, human autonomy, human purpose.

  Lewis Mumford

  Running, Availability, People

  1970 TheMyth of theMachine.

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Order, Issues, Finals

  "The Conduct Of Life". Book by Lewis Mumford. Chapter: "The Fulfillment of Man", 1951.

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Expression, Humanity, Intuition

  5 Copy quote

• Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

  Lewis Mumford

  Past, Tradition, Pessimist

  Lewis Mumford (1940). “Faith for living”

  59 Copy quote

• In the name of economy a thousand wasteful devices would be invented; and in the name of efficiency new forms of mechanical time-wasting would be devised: both processes gained speed through the nineteenth century and have come close to the limit of extravagant futility in our own time. But labor-saving devices could only achieve their end-that of freeing mankind for higher functions-if the standard of living remained stable. The dogma of increasing wants nullified every real economy and set the community in a collective squirrel-cage.

  Lewis Mumford

  Real, Names, Squirrels

  5 Copy quote

• If we never met again in our lives I should feel that somehow the whole adventure of existence was justified by my having met you.

  Lewis Mumford

  Adventure, Justified, Should

  Lewis Mumford (1979). “My works and days: a personal chronicle”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Color, Goal, Personality

  58 Copy quote

• Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

  Lewis Mumford

  Funny, Witty, Flower

  Quote Magazine 8 Oct. 1961

  20 Copy quote

• War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.

  Lewis Mumford

  Peace, War, Ubuntu

  Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner (2010). “Technics and Civilization”, p.83, University of Chicago Press

  8 Copy quote

• Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day.

  Lewis Mumford

  Blessing, Thug, People

  Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner (2010). “Technics and Civilization”, p.301, University of Chicago Press

  7 Copy quote

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

  Lewis Mumford

  Forgotten, Flexible, Efficient

  5 Copy quote

• Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.

  Lewis Mumford

  Self, Growth, Transformation

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Creativity, Men, Order

  Lewis Mumford (1967). “The Myth of the Machine: Technics and human development”, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

  8 Copy quote

• I'm a pessimist about probabilities, I'm an optimist about possibilities.

  Lewis Mumford

  Optimism, Possibility, Pessimist

  "Lewis Mumford Remembers". The New York Times, July 6, 1977.

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Life, Aggravation, Sacred

  Lewis Mumford (2016). “The Culture of Cities”, p.38, Open Road Media

  14 Copy quote

• The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.

  Lewis Mumford

  Art, Becoming, Transformation

  9 Copy quote

• 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 they did not bother to justify it: the expansion and fulfillment of the material wants of man, and the spread of these benefits, from the few who had once preempted them, to the many who had so long lived on the scraps Dives had thrown into the gutter.

  Lewis Mumford

  Men, Long, Expansion

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Happy Life, Sight

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  Home, Men, Creating

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• The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion.

  Lewis Mumford

  Real, Thinking, Government

  "Philosophers of the Earth: Conversations with Ecologists". Book by Anne Chisholm, 1972.

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Distance, Class, People

  "The City in History". Book by Lewis Mumford, p. 486, 1961.

  5 Copy quote

• One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.

  Lewis Mumford

  Ironic, Intelligence, Irony

  7 Copy quote

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