Lewis Mumford Quotes - Page 2

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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

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

  Lewis Mumford

  Creativity, Artist, Carpe Diem

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

  Lewis Mumford

  Past, Tradition, Pessimist

  Lewis Mumford (1940). “Faith for living”

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

  Lewis Mumford

  Funny, Witty, Flower

  Quote Magazine 8 Oct. 1961

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• Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.

  Lewis Mumford

  Self, Growth, Transformation

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

  Data, Experience, Energy

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

  Lewis Mumford

  Art, Becoming, Transformation

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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

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• Above all we need, particularly as children, the reassuring presence of a visible community, an intimate group that enfolds us with understanding and love, and that becomes an object of our spontaneous loyalty, as a criterion and point of reference for the rest of the human race.

  Lewis Mumford

  Loyalty, Children, Race

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• I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, "This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!"

  Lewis Mumford

  Tombstone, Men, Personality

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

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• If there are favourable habitats and favorable forms of association for animalsand plants, as ecology demonstrates, why not for men? If each particular natural environment has has its own balance; is there not perhaps an equivalent of this in culture?

  Lewis Mumford

  Men, Balance, Culture

  "The Culture of Cities, Secker & Warburg". Book by Lewis Mumford, 1938.

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• 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

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