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Lewis Mumford: 150 quotes2 likes

“Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.”

Lewis Mumford book Technics and Civilization

Source: Technics and Civilization (1934), Ch. 6, sct. 11

“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.”

Lewis Mumford book The City in History

Source: The City in History (1961), Ch. 18

“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.”

Source: The Conduct Of Life (1951), Ch. 1

“The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.”

Lewis Mumford book Technics and Civilization

Source: Technics and Civilization (1934), Ch. 1, sct. 2

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

Source: The Culture of Cities (1938), Ch. 1, sct. 5

“Perhaps never before have the peoples of the world been so close to losing the very core of their humanity; for of what use are cosmic energies, if they are handled by disoriented and demoralized men?”

THE CHALLENGE TO RENEWAL: The Promise of Our Age
The Conduct Of Life (1951)

“By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.”

"The Challenge of Renewal"
The Conduct Of Life (1951)

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

Lewis Mumford book Technics and Civilization

Source: Technics and Civilization (1934), Ch. 8, sct. 12

“A community whose life is not irrigated by art and science, by religion and philosophy, day upon day, is a community that exists half alive.”

Faith for Living (1940)

“In the mass movement into the suburban areas a new kind of community was produced, which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban refuge: a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.”

Lewis Mumford book The City in History

pg 486
The City in History (1961)

“However far modern science and technics have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson: Nothing is impossible.”

Lewis Mumford book Technics and Civilization

Source: Technics and Civilization (1934), Ch. 8, sct. 13

“In my own household, for example, an electric refrigerator has been in service for nineteen years, with only a single minor repair: an admirable job. Both automatic refrigerators for daily use and deepfreeze preservation are inventions of permanent value. Though one cannot bestow any such unqualified commendation upon the design of the contemporary motor car, one can hardly doubt that if biotechnic criteria were heeded, rather than those of market analysts and fashion experts, an equally good product might come forth from Detroit, with an equally long prospect of continued use.”

Lewis Mumford book The Myth of the Machine

Megatechnic Costs and Benefits
The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970), The Pentagon of Power (1970)

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

My Works and Days (1979)

“(The processes are) doubly ruinous: they impoverish the earth by hastily removing, for the benefit of a few generations, the common resources which, once expended and dissipated, can never be restored; and second, in its technique, its habits, its processes, the paleotechnic period is equally inimical to the earth considered as a human habitat, by its destruction of the beauty of the landscape, its ruining of streams, its pollution of drinking water, its filling the air with a finely divided carboniferous deposit, which chokes both life and vegetation.”

"The Theory and Practice of Regionalism" in The Sociological Review, vol. 20, nos. 1 and 2, 1928.

“Here was my city, immense, overpowering, flooded with energy and light... The world, at that moment , opened before me, challenging me, beckoning me, demanding something of me that it would take more than a lifetime to give, but raising all my energies by its own vivid promise to a higher pitch.”

Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford (1982), p. 130