Lewis Mumford Quotes

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

 

Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.

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

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.