Quotes from Lewis Mumford

If the Eloquent peasant finally obtained justice, as seems indicated at the point where the document breaks off, it was only, we should remember, after he had been teased and tormented, even flogged, by his betters merely to increase their amusement over his delightful impudence in standing up for his rights and answering back.

Our chief reason for over-rating the importance of tools and machines is that man's most significant early inventions, in ritual, social organization, morals, and language, left no material remains, while stone tools can be associated with recognizable hominid bones for at least half a million years.

Toute transformation sociale (...) s'est fondée sur de nouvelles bases métaphysiques et idéologiques; ou plutôt, sur des émotions et intuitions plus profondes, dont l'expression rationalisée prend la forme du cosmos et de la nature de l'homme.

Even in the eighteenth century, before either the French Revolution or the paleotechnic revolution had been consummated, it had become the fashion to discredit municipal authorities and to sneer at local interests. In the newly organized states, even those based on republican principles, only matters of national moment, organized by political parties, counted in men's hopes or dreams.

Now, the whole picture of 'backwardness' changes as soon as we cease to judge earlier technologies by the provincial standards of our own power-centered culture, with its worship of the machine, its respect for the uniform, the mass-produced, the mass-consumed, and with its disregard for individuality, variety and choice, except in strict conformity to the demands of the megamachine.

Not how long you live, but how much you have lived, how much meaning your life has absorbed and passed on, is what matters.

The word 'year' is meaningless as applied to a physical system by itself: it is not the stars or the planets that experience years, still less measure them, but man. This very observation is the result of man's attention to recurrent movements, seasonable events, biological rhythms, measurable sequences. When the idea of a year is projected back upon the physical universe, it tells something further that is important to man: otherwise, it is a poetic fiction.

it seems to me plain that all the elements for the urban implosion were present and that the city, in one form or another, performed its special function-that of complex receptacle for maximizing the possibilities of human intercourse and passing on the contents of civilization.

Since ritual order has now largely passed into mechanical order, the present revolt of the younger generation against the machine has made a practice of promoting disorder and randomness: but that, too, has turned into a ritual, just as compulsive and as 'meaningless' as the routine it seeks to assault.

What I would suggest is that the most important agent in effecting the change from a decentralized village economy to a highly organized urban economy, was the king, or rather, the institution of Kingship. The industrialization and commercialization we now associate with urban growth was for centuries a subordinate phenomenon probably even emerging later in time :

our megatechnic culture, based as it is on the strange supposition that subjective malice has no reality and that evils do not exist, except in the sense of reparable mechanical defects, has proved itself incompetent to take on such responsibilities.

No single trait, not even tool-making, is sufficient to identify man. What is specially and uniquely human is man's capacity to combine a wide variety of animal propensities into an emergent cultural entity: a human personality.

Con i mezzi di comunicazione di massa su grandi distanze, l'isolamento della popolazione si è rivelato un mezzo di controllo molto efficace.

At the first rumors of revolt, or even in preventive anticipation, the ruling class would take up the mace and the sword to re-establish its authority. This tension kept the main beneficiaries of the parasitic regime in a state of animal alertness and fitness; and they habitually re-sharpened their predatory edge by hunting lions and tigers. Those who lost their edge and sank into parasitic inertia were speedily displaced by more able and active rivals.

Significantly, it was during the third dynasty of Ur-a period of viogorous constructive activity-that all the kings except the founder claimed divinity. This evidence decisively couples divine kingship with the characteristic public works program of the megamachine. Little tasks might still be left to little men, but big tasks belonged to the king by reason of the special powers he commanded: above all, the unique power to create a colossal labor machine.

The notion that every item of exchange must be accounted for and that 'the books must balance' preceded by centuries Robert von Mayer's doctrine of the conservation of energy.

Nothing short of a revolutionary uprising can account for the inter-regnum of some two centuries that separated the 'Old Kingdom' from the 'Middle Kingdom.' And though the archaic power complex was finally restored, it was modified by various important concessions, including the extension of immortality (once a Pharaonic or upper-class privilege) to the population at large.

To achieve willing compliance without undue waste in constant police supervision, the governing body must create an appearance of beneficence and helpfulness, sufficient to awaken some degree of affection and trust and loyalty.

It is only at a high stage of individuation, made possible at first by the painted or carved image, the written symbol, and the printed book, that true freedom-the freedom to escape from the passing moment and the present visible place, to challenge past experience or modify future action-can be achieved. To be aware only of immediate stimuli and immediate sensations is a medical indication of brain injury.

Both sacred power and temporal power became swollen by absorbing the new inventions of civilization; and the very need for an intelligent control of every part of the environment gave additional authority to those dedicated either to intelligence or control, the priest or monarch, often united in a single office.

But instead of freeing labor, the royal mega-machine boasted of imprisoning and enslaving it.

We've seen that even in the simplest situations nonlinearities can interfere with a linear approach to aggregates. That point holds in general: nonlinear interactions almost always make the behavior of the aggregate more complicated than would be predicted by summing or averaging.

Ideally the megamachine's personnel should consist of celibates, detached from family responsibilities, communal institutions, and ordinary human affections: such day-to-day celibacy as we actually find in armies, monasteries, and prisons. For the other name for the division of labor, when it reaches the point of solitary confinement at a single task for a whole lifetime, is the dismemberment of man.

The power system admits only one kind of complexity, that which conforms to its own method and belongs to the current period: a system so uniform that its components are in effect interchangeable parts, conceived as if by a single collective mind.