Quotes from Lewis Mumford

Enough to point out here that though much of the polytechnic heritage has been lost forever, the concept of a diversified polytechnics will remain a necessary one in any humanly oriented system. In such a system the organism and the human personality, not the machine, will provide the master-model.

Science, I repeat, produced many 'saints,' dedicating their lives with monastic devotion to their discipline-but no notable rebellious martyrs against the political establishment. Yet, as we shall note later, that alienation and renunciation are at last perhaps under way.

Too easily have historians imputed war chiefly to man's savage past, and have looked upon war as an incursion of so-called primitive nomads, the 'have-nots,' against normally 'peaceful' centers of industry and trade. Nothing could be further from the historic truth. War and domination, rather than peace and co-operation, were ingrained in the original structure of the ancient city.

Just as ritual, if I have correctly interpreted it , was the first step toward effective expression and communication through language, so taboo was the first step toward moral discipline. Without both, man's career might have ended long ago, as so many powerful rulers and nations have ended their lives, in psychotic outbreaks and life-depressing perversions.

By remaining non-specialized, man opened up a thousand fresh paths for his own further development.

Let us not forget that the same demands for accurate artillery fire resulted in the invention of the modern computer.

Though the moral onus for promoting war has made the munitions manufacturers the scapegoats, the fact is that the paper-profits of war equally enrich every other part of the national economy, even agriculture; for war, with its unparalleled consumption of goods, and its unparalleled wastes, temporarily overcomes the chronic defect of an expanding technology-'over-production.' War, by restoring scarcity, is necessary on classic capitalist terms to ensure profit.

A city that is of one man only is no city, says Haemon in Sophocles' 'Antigone.' Only where differences are valued and opposition tolerated can be transmuted into dialectic: so in its internal economy the city is a place-to twist Blake's dictum-that depresses corporeal and promotes mental war.

If civilized society has not yet outgrown war, as it outgrew less respectable manifestations of primitive magic, like child sacrifice and cannibalism, it is partly because the city itself in its structure and institutions continued to give war both a durable concrete form and a magical pretext for existence. Beneath all war's technical improvements lay an irrational belief, still deeply imbedded in the collective unconscious: only by wholesale human sacrifice can the community be saved.

Perhaps the best definition for the inhabitants of an early city is that they are a permanently captive farm population.

This proposal for genetic control exposes the idea of control itself in its ultimate absurdity: the arrogant notion that finite minds, operating with the limited equipment of their particular culture and historic moment, will ever be qualified to exercise absolute control over the infinite future possibilities of human development.

The coming back of these amphitheatres and stadiums into the modern city signifies not merely the revival of athletics, but of more brutalized forms of sport, in partial compensation for the emasculated, over-regimented existence of the metropolitan economy.

On any pure theory of causality or statistical probability, organization would be completely improbable without the external aid of a divine organizer.

The ancient commks though that their own respect for custom and common law, as against tyrannous caprice, was a unique product of their culture. But actually it was a witness to their continuity with an older village democracy we first meet in Mesopotamia: an institution that seems to precede all more sophisticated exercise of control by a dominant minority, imposing their alien traditions or their equally alien upper-class innovations upon a subjugated if acquiescent population.

Pedro Armillas has pointed out that the crisis that seems to have developed in Meso-American society around 900 A.D. resulted in a change from a theocratic pattern to a secular-militaristic one, "in which religion was still a powerful force social control, but the priesthood was in a subordinate position of temporal power, and there was a correlative change in the settlement pattern.

The New World vision seemed to enlarge and exalt every human possibility, even though the explorers and pioneers, in turning their backs on the Old World, did not in fact leave the 'cruel sword' or the 'ignominious plague' behind them, for their smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis decimated those natives whom their guns did not exterminate.

Thus even before the city is a place of fixed residence, it begins as a meeting place to which people periodically return: the magnet comes before the container, and this ability to attract non-residents to it for intercourse and spiritual stimulus no less than trade remains one of the essential criteria of the city, a witness to its inherent dynamism, as opposed to the more fixed and indrawn form of the village, hostile to the outsider.

The price of imposing the ruthless will of an ideological minority upon a large population is massacre; and the ultimate victim of that massacre is the revolution itself.

What made the new world picture so potent was that its method of deliberately ignoring the complex reality of organisms was an immense labor-saving device: its pragmatic efficiency counterbalanced its conceptual superficiality. The universe as a whole, the whole that contains all other wholes, is immeasurable and unthinkable in its infinite variety and multi-fold concreteness. Only by samples and abstractions can one put together in the mind a playtoy model.

Only now that village ways are rapidly disappearing throughout the world can we estimate all that the city owes to them for the vital energy and loving nature that made possible man's further development.

That idea of time cannot be located in space, though it has endless spatial manifestations, both physical and symbolic.

Had Napoleon succeeded in his conquest of Europe, and had he had time to consolidate his military-bureaucratic regime, the megamachine might have emerged, at least halfway toward its modern form, by the middle of the nineteenth century: indeed, even the bedraggled ideological aftermath of Napoleonism conjured up in the mind of young Ernest Renan a future not unlike that which we are now facing: dictatorship by a scientific elite.

Destroy the undefinable subjective component, and the whole cosmic process, like the process of time-keeping, becomes meaningless-indeed unimaginable.

By the time Herodotus visited Egypt in the fifth century B.C., the over-all division of labor and the minute subdivision into specialisms had reached a point comparable to that which it has come to again in our own time; for he records that "some physicians are for the eyes, others for the head, others for the teeth, others for the belly, and others for internal disorders.