Lewis Mumford Cities Quotations

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.

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

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

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

The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city.

The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.

When cities were first founded, an old Egyptian scribe tells us, the mission of the founder was to 'put gods in their shrines.' The task of the coming city is not essentially different: its mission is to put the highest concerns of man at the center of all his activities.