Quotes from Lewis Mumford

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.

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

Geneva has the sleepy tidiness of a man who combs his hair while yet in his pyjamas.

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.

Every transformation of humanity has rested upon deep stirrings and intuitions, whose rationalized expression takes the form of a new picture of the cosmos and the nature of the human.

Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.

If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.

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

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

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

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

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

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 the training...

Life is an art we are required to practice without preparation, a score that we play at sight even before we have mastered our instruments.

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

A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.

Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.

Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.

Only when love takes the lead will the earth, and life on earth, be safe again. And not until then.

Life is an art we are required to practice without preparation, a score that we play at sight even before we have mastered our instruments.

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

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf

Ritual, art, poesy, drama, music, dance, philosophy, science, myth, religion are all as essential to man as his daily bread: man's true life consists not alone in the work activities that directly sustain him, but in the symbolic activities which give significance both to the processes of work and their ultimate products and consummations.

To have a life that is in any way detached from the megatechnic complex , to say nothing of being cockily independent of it, or recalcitrant to its demands, is regarded as nothing less than a form of sabotage. Hence the fury evoked by the Hippies-quite apart from any objectionable behavior. On megatechnic terms complete withdrawal is heresy and treason, if not evidence of unsound mind. The arch-enemy of the Affluent Economy would not be Karl Marx but Henry Thoreau.