Quotes from Lewis Mumford

The ability to transmit in symbolic forms and human patterns a representative portion of a culture is the great mark of the city: this is the condition for encouraging the fullest expression of human capacities and potentialities, even in the rural and primitive areas beyond.

Patently, a chronic state of war was a heavy price to pay for the boasted benefits of 'civilization.' Permanent improvement could come only by exorcising the myth of divine kingship, demounting its too-powerful megamachine and abating its ruthless exploitation of man-power.

To dismiss as non-existent what happens to be indescribable is to equate existence with information. Can a color be described solely in terms of its mathematical determinable wave length? No matter how accurate this abstract description may be, it gives no indication of color as a subjective experience. So with pain. To deny the existence or importance of pain because it is too private to be described-is that an example of scientific objectivity?

Tolstoi felt that the strange dark room he had awakened in, far from home, was a coffin. As in the womb-dream of childhood, he felt himself floating in an oppressive nothingness. No better image could be found for the state of modern man. That collective coffin is now the envelope of our whole 'civilization': not only materialized but accurately symbolized in underground shelters and military control centers: the technocratic tomb of tombs.

But now the forces challenging the power complex have a special advantage that derives from the advances in technology: its members, however separated in space, are united in time, are united in space through books, discs, taped records, and frequent, quickly arranged face-to-face meetings. Hence resistance to the megamachine is no longer pathetically sporadic, but increasingly coordinated through constant inter-viewing as well as inter-communication.

Something essential to man's creativity, even in science, may disappear when the defiantly metaphoric language of poetry gives way completely to the denatured language of the computer.

What is more to the point, this passiveness, this submissiveness, to say nothing of the lack of weapons, made it easy for small bodies of hunters to draw tribute-in present-day usage 'protection money'-from much larger communities of farmers. Thus the rise of warriors, so to speak in paradox, preceded war.

Paradoxically, then, the greatest gains that have been achieved through command of nuclear reaction have been purely spiritual ones: an enriched conception of cosmic realities: a deeper insight into the nature of the universe and of the place that living organisms, and finally man himself, have come to occupy.

The very growth of the city depended on bringing in food, raw materials, skills, and men from other communities either by conquest or trade. In doing this, the city multiplied the opportunities for psychological shock and stimulus.

The production of the atom bomb was in fact crucial to the building of the new megamachine, little though anyone at the time had that larger objective in mind. For it was the success of this project that gave the scientists a central place in the new power complex and resulted eventually in the invention of many other instruments that have rounded out and universalized the system of control first established to meet only the exigencies of war.

In the 'Odyssey,' Homer enumerates the strangers that even a simple community would "call from abroad"- the "master of some craft, a prophet, a healer of disease, a builder or else a wondrous bard." In contrast to the original peasants and chiefs these are the new inhabitants of the city. Where they were lacking, the country town remained sunk in a somnolent provincialism.

In the 'Instructions for King Merikere,' written in the inter-regnum between the Old and the Middle Kingdoms of Egypt, we read: "Be a craftsman in speech, so that thou mayest prevail, for the power [of a man] is the tongue, and speech is mightier than fighting.

It is the system itself that, once set up, gives orders.

Even if the rest of man's history were lost, the vocabularies, the grammars, and the literature of all his present languages would testify to a mind infinitely above the level of any other living creature's. And if some sudden mutation afflicting the progeny of the entire human race resulted in the birth of only deaf-mutes, the outcome would be almost as fatal to human existence as that of a nuclear chain reaction.

Now the equipment, organization, and tactics of an army were not achieved overnight: one must allow for a period of transition before a large mass of men could be trained to operate under unified command. Until towns arose and population was sufficiently concentrated, the prelude to war was an organized but one-sided display of power and bellicosity in raiding expeditions for wood, malachite, gold, slaves.

The pickaxe and the basket built cities The steadfast house the pickaxe builds... The house which rebels against the king, The house which is not submissive to its king, The pickaxe makes it submissive to its king.

The light of human consciousness is, so far, the ultimate wonder of life, and the main justification for all the suffering and misery that have accompanied human development. In the tending of that fire, in the building of that world, in the intensification of that light, in the widening of man's open-eyed and sympathetic fellowship with all created being, lies the meaning of human history.

In short, the Germans not merely enlarged the dimensions of the ancient megamachine, but made important innovations in the techniques of mass control: innovations that later corporate megamachines are now perfecting with the aid of spying devices, opinion polls, market research, and computerized dossiers on private life. In the background, the torture chamber and the crematorium, if not planetary incineration, are still ready to complete the job.

Despite the elimination of subjectivity from the mechanical world picture, the desire for perfection, the need to defy and circumvent fate, the impulse to transcendence, can be observed in technology, too, along with other manifestations common to religion, like the readiness to accept sacrifice and premature death.

As I showed earlier, the idea of time is more important than any physical instrument invented for recording time;

Only through encouraging decentralized communal agents will such a worldwide organization as an effectively reconstituted United Nations find the massive human backing needed for banishing all weapons of genocide and biocide, and ensuring justice and comity among its members. To assemble peace-making power in a world authority without such a revitalizing of autonomous smaller units capable of exercising local and regional initiatives, would be to rivet together the ultimate megamachine.

If hunting is by definition a predatory occupation, gardening is a symbiotic one; and in the loose ecological pattern of the early garden, the interdependence of living organisms became visible, and the direct involvement of man was the very condition for productivity and creativity.

But though the parts of language are standardized and in a sense mass-produced, they achieve the maximum of variety, individuality, and autonomy. No technology has yet approached this degree of refinement: the intricate mechanisms of the so-called Nuclear Age are extremely primitive in comparison, for they can utilize and express only a narrow segment of the human personality divorced from its total historic expression.

With this new 'megatechnics' the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man's role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalized, collective organizations