Lewis Mumford

Sociologist

1895-10-19

Quotes by Lewis Mumford

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

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

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• 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.

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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 training.

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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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.

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• 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.

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• Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.

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• Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.

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• 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.

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• Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

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• By putting business before every other manifestation of life, our mechanical and financial civilization has forgotten the chief business of life: namely, growth, reproduction, development. It pays infinite attention to the incubator-and it forgets the egg!

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• Henceforward, I shout to the heavens, I shall deliver no more lectures on behalf of good causes: I am the good cause that denies the need for such lectures. Avaunt, importuning world! Back to my cell.

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• The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.

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• 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.

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• 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!

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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.

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• Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.

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