Lewis Mumford Quotations | Page 2

Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.

One's worst enormities remain within, and it is only one's vulgar commonplaces of error and folly that turn into murders and suicides, treasons, infidelities, and betrayals.

War is a specific product of civilization.

Idealism and science continue to function in separate compartments; and yet 'the happiness of man on earth' depends upon their combination.

While a great many other ideas and measures are of prime importance for the good life of the community, that which concerns its architectural expression is the notion of the community as limited in numbers, and in area... To express these relations clearly, to embody them in buildings and roads and gardens in which each individual structure will be subordinated to the whole - this is the end of community planning.

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

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.

Genuine [economic] value lies in the power to sustain or enrich life

Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.

The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.