Top 100 Lewis Mumford Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.”

— Lewis Mumford

2. “The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.”

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

4. “Order and creativity are complementary.”

— Lewis Mumford

5. “Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.”

— Lewis Mumford

6. “In vulgar usage, progress has come to mean limitless movement in space and time, accompanied, necessarily, by an equally limitless command of energy: culminating in limitless destruction.”

— Lewis Mumford

7. “Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.”

— Lewis Mumford

8. “Trend is not destiny.”

— Lewis Mumford

9. “I’m a pessimist about probabilities; I’m an optimist about possibilities.”

— Lewis Mumford

10. “Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.”

— Lewis Mumford

11. “The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.”

— Lewis Mumford

12. “The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city.”

— Lewis Mumford

13. “Only when love takes the lead will the earth, and life on earth, be safe again. And not until then.”

— Lewis Mumford

14. “A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.”

— Lewis Mumford

15. “When cities were first founded, an old Egyptian scribe tells us, the mission of the founder was to ‘put gods in their shrines.’ The task of the coming city is not essentially different: its mission is to put the highest concerns of man at the center of all his activities.”

— Lewis Mumford

16. “By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.”

— Lewis Mumford

17. “Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.”

— Lewis Mumford

18. “New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.”

— Lewis Mumford

19. “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.”

— Lewis Mumford

20. “Idealism and science continue to function in separate compartments; and yet ‘the happiness of man on earth’ depends upon their combination.”

— Lewis Mumford

21. “Every transformation of humanity has rested upon deep stirrings and intuitions, whose rationalized expression takes the form of a new picture of the cosmos and the nature of the human.”

— Lewis Mumford

22. “If we never met again in our lives I should feel that somehow the whole adventure of existence was justified by my having met you.”

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

24. “A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.”

— Lewis Mumford

25. “A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.”

— Lewis Mumford

26. “Geneva has the sleepy tidiness of a man who combs his hair while yet in his pyjamas.”

— Lewis Mumford

27. “Above all we need, particularly as children, the reassuring presence of a visible community, an intimate group that enfolds us with understanding and love, and that becomes an object of our spontaneous loyalty, as a criterion and point of reference for the rest of the human race.”

— Lewis Mumford

28. “The earth is the Lord’s fullness thereof: this is no longer a hollow dictum of religion, but a directive for economic action toward human brotherhood.”

— Lewis Mumford

29. “What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself.”

— Lewis Mumford

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

— Lewis Mumford

31. “Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.”

— Lewis Mumford

32. “It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man’s principal toy and tool: without the meanings and values it sustains, all man’s other tools would be worthless.”

— Lewis Mumford

33. “One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.”

— Lewis Mumford

34. “Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception, or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.“We effectively became “time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers” with the invention of the clock.””

— Lewis Mumford

35. “Ritual, art, poesy, drama, music, dance, philosophy, science, myth, religion are all as essential to man as his daily bread: man’s true life consists not alone in the work activities that directly sustain him, but in the symbolic activities which give significance both to the processes of work and their ultimate products and consummations.”

— Lewis Mumford

36. “Faith in the creative process, in the dynamics of emergence, in the values and purposes that transcend past achievements and past forms, is the precondition of all further growth.”

— Lewis Mumford

37. “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.”

— Lewis Mumford

38. “In our entrancement with the motorcar, we have forgotten how much more efficient and how much more flexible the footwalker is.”

— Lewis Mumford

39. “The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.”

— Lewis Mumford

40. “War is both the product of an earlier corruption, and a producer of new corruptions.”

— Lewis Mumford

41. “Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.”

— Lewis Mumford

42. “What plethora of material goods can possibly atone for a waking life so humanly belittling, if not degrading, as the push-button tasks left to human performers?”

— Lewis Mumford

43. “A Society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure and to another all the burdens of work condemns both classes to spiritual sterility.”

— Lewis Mumford

44. “The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.”

— Lewis Mumford

45. “The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.”

— Lewis Mumford

46. “If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.”

— Lewis Mumford

47. “The fact that order and creativity are complementary has been basic to man’s cultural development; for he has to internalize order to be able to give external form to his creativity.”

— Lewis Mumford

48. “Don’t take the will for the deed; get the deed.”

— Lewis Mumford

49. “The humanities and science are not in inherent conflict but have become separated in the twentieth century. Now their essential unity must be re-emphasized, so that twentieth-century multiplicity may become twentieth-century unity.”

— Lewis Mumford

50. “The convenience of timekeeping is greatly overrated; and the people who practice it so faithfully that they lose the capacity for appreciating the fixed and the static and the spatially related experiences cut themselves off from a good part of reality.”

— Lewis Mumford