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Lewis Mumford - From the Aging category:
Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Ambition category:
Don't take the will for the deed; get the deed. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Architecture category:
While a great many other ideas and measures are of prime importance for the good life of the community, that which concerns its architectural expression is the notion of the community as limited in numbers, and in area... To express these relations clearly, to embody them in buildings and roads and gardens in which each individual structure will be subordinated to the whole - this is the end of community planning. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Art category:
Because of their origin and purpose, the meanings of art are of a different order from the operational meanings of science and technics: they relate, not to external means and consequences, but to internal transformations, and unless it produce these internal transformations the work of art is either perfunctory or dead. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Boredom category:
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)
Lewis Mumford - From the Contemplation category:
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)
Lewis Mumford - From the Culture category:
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)
Lewis Mumford - From the Danger category:
One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Difficulty category:
A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Dreams category:
The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Earth category:
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)
Lewis Mumford - From the Friendship category:
Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Humour category:
Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Idealism category:
Idealism and science continue to function in separate compartments; and yet 'the happiness of man on earth' depends upon their combination. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Immortality category:
The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Immortality category:
Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Importance category:
The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Impossibilities category:
However far modern science and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson; nothing is impossible. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Impotence category:
We must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to the expression of moral and aesthetic values as we now give to science, to invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Insecurity category:
Only when love takes the lead will the earth, and life on earth, be safe again. And not until then. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Interest category:
The artist does not illustrate science (but) he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Life category:
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)
Lewis Mumford - From the Life category:
Life is an art... a score that we play at sight even before we have mastered our instruments. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Meaning category:
When art seems to be empty of meaning, as no doubt some of the abstract painting of our own day actually does seem, what the painting says, indeed what the artist is shrieking at the top of his voice, is that life has become empty of all rational content and coherence, and that, in times like these, is far from a meaningless statement. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Meaning category:
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)
Lewis Mumford - From the Morality category:
Virtue is not a chemical product... it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Nature category:
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)
Lewis Mumford - From the Optimism category:
I'm a pessimist about probabilities; I'm an optimist about possibilities. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Patriotism category:
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Politics category:
The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Possibilities category:
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)
Lewis Mumford - From the Practice category:
Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Progress category:
The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Purpose category:
The artist has a special task: that of reminding men of their humanity and the promise of their creativity. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Space category:
In its revolt against congestion and sordor, a space-hungry generation has, I fear, developed eyes that are bigger than its stomach. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Survival category:
Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Technology category:
To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Tradition category:
Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Travel category:
Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities. (Lewis Mumford)
Lewis Mumford - From the Words category:
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)
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