Quotes from Lewis Mumford

Without leisure there can be neither art nor science nor fine conversation, nor any ceremonious performance of the offices of love and friendship.

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

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 has a special task and duty; the task of reminding men of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.

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 of a mere beginner.

War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.

Life is the only art that we are required to practise without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere beginner.

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

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

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

The fact that order and creativity are complementary has been basic to man's cultural development; for he has to internalize order to be able to give external form to his creativity.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

Also there was considerable distrust of planning in any form. Planning was something the government was going to do to you. 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, unfortunately.

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.

A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility.

What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself.

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