Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford, KBEwas an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer. Mumford was influenced by the work of Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes and worked closely with his associate the British sociologist Victor Branford...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSociologist
Date of Birth19 October 1895
CountryUnited States of America
time cutting reality
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.
adventure giving house
Adventure is humdrum and routine unless one assimilates it, unless one relates it to a central core which grows within and gives it contour and significance. Raw experience is empty, just as empty as the forecastle of a whaler as in a chamber of a counting house; for it is not what one does, but in a manifold sense, what one realizes that keeps existence from being vain and trivial.
tasks waking buttons
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?
drinking air water
(The processes are) doubly ruinous: they impoverish the earth by hastily removing, for the benefit of a few generations, the common resources which, once expended and dissipated, can never be restored; and second, in its technique, its habits, its processes, the paleotechnic period is equally inimical to the earth considered as a human habitat, by its destruction of the beauty of the landscape, its ruining of streams, its pollution of drinking water, its filling the air with a finely divided carboniferous deposit, which chokes both life and vegetation.
progress cacophony wonder
The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression.
optimism possibility pessimist
I'm a pessimist about probabilities; I'm an optimist about possibilities.
expression organization giving
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.
growth birth immortality
Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
good-life garden expression
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.
government collaboration investment
To the extent that the scientist's capacity for pursuing the truth depends upon costly apparatus, institutional collaboration and heavy capital investment by government or industry he is no longer his own master.
obesity traffic cures
Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.
order mind principles
We have lost faith in the formal powers of the mind, not, as some suppose, because our universe is too difficult to grasp, but because we lack the inner principle of order.
life aggravation degradation
Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.
war army negative
In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer...