Quotes from Lewis Mumford

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

The masters of the underground citadel are committed to a 'war' they cannot bring to an end, with weapons whose ultimate effects they cannot control, for purposes that they cannot accomplish.

The shepherd may in fact be looked upon as the spiritual brother of the hunter, his better self, stressing the protective rather than the predatory function.

In times of peace, kings and nobles lived by the pleasure principle: eating, drinking, hunting, playing games, copulating, all in ostentatious excess. So at the very period when the myth of the machine was taking form, the problems of an economy of abundance first became visible in the behavior and fantasies of the ruling classes-here, too, mirroring in advance the processes at work in our own age.

When Galileo divided experienced reality into two spheres, a subjective sphere, which he chose to exclude from science, and an objective sphere, freed theoretically from man's visible presence, but known through rigorous mathematical analysis, he was dismissing as unsubstantial and unreal the cultural accretions of meaning that had made mathematics-itself a purely subjective distillation-possible.

What was atrocious was the fact that, like every other building in the new towns, they were dumped almost at random; the leakage of escaping gas scented the so-called gas-house districts, and not surprisingly these districts frequently became among the most degraded sections of the city. Towering above the town, polluting its air, the gas tanks symbolized the dominance of 'practical' interests over life-needs.

The point I am making is that if craftsmanship had not been condemned to death by starvation wages and meager profits, if it had, in fact, been protected and subsidized as so many of the new mechanical industries were in fact extravagantly subsidized, right down to the jet planes and rockets today, our technology as a whole, even that of 'fine technics' would have been immensely richer-and more efficient.

The megamachine is an elephant that fears even the smallest mouse.

Through its complex orchestration of time and space, no less than through the social division of labor, life in the city takes on the character of a symphony: specialized human aptitudes, specialized instruments, give rise to sonorous results which, neither in volume nor in quality, could be achieved by any single piece. Cities

To become a full human being is nothing less than a lifetime's task.

The Greek poleis in their best days had no great surplus of goods: what they had was a surplus of time, that is, leisure, free and untrammeled, not commited-as in America today-to excessive materialistic consumption, but available for conversation, sexual passion, intellectual reflection, and esthetic delight.

Should we wonder, then, that a world that has been constructed deliberately to accommodate machines and mechanized men has proved increasingly hostile to organic realities and human needs? Without a more organic ideological framework it is hardly remarkable that our one-sided technology has cut man off from his biological potentialities and alienated him from his historic selves, both past and future.

Lonely courage played a part that mass obedience to the leader's command could never rival. Such courage produced heroes of the mind as well as of the battlefield, often in the same person.

To describe even in the barest outline the multitude of changes necessary to turn the power complex into an organic complex, and a money economy into a life economy, lies beyond the capacities of any individual mind; any attempt at a detailed picture would be presumptuous.

But the grinding of even soft stones is a tedious and laborious process; granite or diorite, both extremely hard, demand a willingness to endure drudgery that no human group had ever imposed in itself before. Our very word to express ennui, 'boring,' derives from-boring. Here was ritual repetition pushed almost beyond endurance.

Since science opened no path into private and subjective experience, it was forced to deny either its importance or its existence.

Each one of us, as long as life stirs in him, may play a part in extricating himself from the power system by asserting his primacy as a person in quiet acts of mental or physical withdrawal-in gestures of non-conformity, in abstentions, restrictions, inhibitions, which will liberate him from the domination of the pentagon of power.

If I dare to foresee a promising future other than that which the technocrats (the power elite) have been confidently extrapolating, it is because I have found by personal experience that it is far easier to detach oneself from the system and to make a selective use of its facilities than the promoters of the Affluent Society would have their docile subjects believe.

Through the army, in fact, the standard model of the megamachine was transmitted from culture to culture.

If interest promotes effort, effort in turn sustains interest.

The ideal symbolic site indeed for the new pyramids is, as originally at Los Alamos, the desert, for that is the ultimate environment, done over and more perfectly sterilized by the machine process, which corresponds to the ideology itself.

Agamemnon reproached Clytemnestra for her servile effusiveness of speech: "As a man, not as a god, let me be honored." The delusion of divinity in a ruler was a product of their civic decadence.

The fragrance that permeates his picture of the good life is not the heavy fragrance of rose-petals and incense falling upon languorous couches: it is the fragrance of the morning grass, and the scent of crushed mint or marjoram beneath the feet.

The scientific knowledge that unleashed atomic energy brought genuine insight into the structure of the entire cosmos and in recent years has broken down the gap between pre-organic matter, once regarded as fatally inert and passive, and living organisms.