Quotes from Lewis Mumford

If one asks why early man took so long to improve his technical skills and his material facilities, the answer must be: he concentrated upon the greatest of all utilities first. By his command of words he increasingly embraced every aspect of life and gave it significance as part of a larger whole he retained in his mind. Only within that whole could technics itself have significance. The pursuit of significance crowns every other human achievement.

Although Leonardo, for example, invented the submarine, he deliberately suppressed this invention "on account of the evil nature of men, who would practice assassination at the bottom of the sea." That reservation marks a moral sensitiveness equal to his inventive abilities: only a relative handful of scientists, like the late Norbert Wiener or Leo Szilard in our day, have shown any parallel concern and self-control.

Birdsong itself may have awakened the latent musical gifts of man.

A personal over-concentration upon power as an end in itself is always suspect to the psychologist: he reads into it an attempt to conceal inferiority, impotence, anxiety. When this tendency is combined with inordinate ambitions, uncontrolled hostility and suspicion, and a loss of any sense of the subject's own limitations, leading to 'delusions of grandeur,' this becomes the typical syndrome of paranoia: one of the most difficult psychological states to exorcise.

The great secret of centralized power was secrecy itself. That holds of all totalitarian states down to our own day.

But perhaps the greatest threat to the efficiency of the megamachine came from within: from its rigidity and repression of individual ability, and from a sheer lack of rational purpose.

Unlike any earthbound activity, space exploration is limitless, and the technological demands it makes are insatiable. In this sense, spatial adventurism has indeed the sinister advantages of war: all the more effectively because it recovers for popular consumption the archaic sentiments that originally led to the New World exploration of the sixteenth century and later.

The aim of industry is not primarily to satisfy essential human needs with a minimal productive effort, but to multiply the number of needs, factitious or fictitious, and accommodate them to the maximum mechanical capacity to produce profits. These are the sacred principles of the power complex.

The technical feat of escaping from the field of gravitation is trivial compared to man's escape from the brute unconsciousness of matter and the closed cycle of organic life.

In short, without man's cumulative capacity to give symbolic form to experience, to reflect upon it and re-fashion it and project it, the physical universe would be as empty of meaning as a handless clock: its ticking would tell nothing. The mindfulness of man makes the difference.

There is a bitter lament from Egypt's first great popular uprising that reveals the indignation of the upper classes, because the lower orders had broken into their precincts, and not merely turned their wives into prostitutes, but, what seemed equally bad, captured knowledge that had been withheld from them. "The writings of the august enclosure [the temple] are read....The place of secrets...is [now] laid bare....Magic is exposed." (Admonitions of Ipu-wer: 2300-2050 B.C.?)

What an old-fashioned rationalist would regard as 'meaning-less ritual' was rather, on this interpretation, the ancient foundation layer of all modes of order and significance.

To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.

Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.

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

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

A picture was once a rare sort of symbol, rare enough to call for attentive concentration. Now it is the actual experience that is rare, and the picture has become ubiquitous.

Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further development

The artist does not illustrate science (but) he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does

Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.

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

Each person is a temporary focus of forces, vitalities, and values that carry back to an immemorial past and that reach forward into an unthinkable future.

Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal."

The final goal of human effort is man's self-transforma tion.