Lewis Mumford

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The convenience of timekeeping is greatly overrated and the people who practice it so faithfully that they lose the capacity for appreciating the fixed and the static and the spatially related experiences cut themselves off from a good part of reality.

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

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

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.

The artist does not illustrate science (but) he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

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.

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.

A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.

New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.

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

However far modern science and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson; nothing is impossible.

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.

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

Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.

Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.

Don't take the will for the deed; get the deed.

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.

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