Lewis Mumford quotes - page 4

Trend is not destiny. (Lewis Mumford)
A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind. Even a head wind is better than none. No man ever worked his passage anywhere in a dead calm. View quote
Lewis Mumford
Nothing is permanent: certainly not the frozen images of barbarous power with which fascism now confronts us. View quote
Lewis Mumford
Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival. View quote
Lewis Mumford
Bloodshed kept pace with iron production. View quote
Lewis Mumford
The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. View quote
Lewis Mumford
When the organism dies, the brain dies, too, with all its lifetime accumulations. But the mind reproduces itself by transmitting its symbols to other intermediaries, human and mechanical, than the particular brain that first assembled them. View quote
Lewis Mumford
Here was my city, immense, overpowering, flooded with energy and light... View quote
Lewis Mumford
Today our world faces a crisis: a crisis which, if its consequences are as grave as now seems, may not fully be resolved for another century. View quote
Lewis Mumford
If we are to create balanced human beings, capable of entering into world-wide co-operation with all other men of good will - and that is the supreme task of our generation, and the foundation of all its other potential achievements - we must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to the expression of moral and esthetic values as we now give to science, to invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent. View quote
Lewis Mumford
Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind. (Lewis Mumford)
Instead of clinging to the sardonic funeral towers of metropolitan finance, ours to march out to newly plowed fields, to create fresh patterns of political action, to alter for human purposes the perverse mechanisms or our economic regime, to conceive and to germinate fresh forms of human culture. View quote
Lewis Mumford
If we are to prevent megatechnics from further controlling and deforming every aspect of human culture, we shall be able to do so only with the aid of a radically different model derived directly, not from machines, but from living organisms and organic complexes (ecosystems). View quote
Lewis Mumford
Each religion is a brave guess at the authorship of Hamlet. View quote
Lewis Mumford
Max Beer, in his History of British Socialism, points out that Bacon looked for the happiness of mankind chiefly in the application of science and industry. But by now it is plain that if this alone were sufficient, we could all live in heaven tomorrow. View quote
Lewis Mumford
The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. View quote
Lewis Mumford
The artist does not illustrate science (but) he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does. View quote
Lewis Mumford
Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product. View quote
Lewis Mumford
War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing. View quote
Lewis Mumford
In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer. View quote
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)
Each religion is a brave guess at the authorship of Hamlet. Yet, as far as the play goes does it make any difference whether Shakespeare or Bacon wrote it? Would it make any difference to the actors if their parts happened out of nothingness, if they found themselves acting on the stage because of some gross and unpardonable accident? Would it make any difference if the playwright gave them the lines or whether they composed them themselves, so long as the lines were properly spoken? Would it make any difference to the characters if A Midsummer Night's Dream was really a dream? View quote
Lewis Mumford
For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old. View quote
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. View quote
Lewis Mumford
The humanities and science are not in inherent conflict but have become separated in the twentieth century. Now their essential unity must be re-emphasized, so that twentieth-century multiplicity may become twentieth-century unity. View quote
Lewis Mumford