Lewis Mumford Quotes

"Bellamy leaves no doubt about the totalitarian nature of his utopia. "If a man refuses to accept the authority of the state and the inevitability of industrial service, he loses all his rights as a human being." All his rights as a human being? Did this tender-minded reformer realize what these words would mean? If not, our better-seasoned generation can tell him: for we have had before us the case of the Soviet Russian poet who was sentenced to jail as a "work-resister" because he devoted his days to translating, and to writing poetry-the 'wrong' sort of poetry of course. In tracing the grim, monolithic outlines of his perfect commonwealth, Bellamy, in his innocence, was more realistic than the anti-utopian Karl Marx, who, once socialism was installed, foresaw the State withering away."

It is only at a high stage of individuation, made possible at first by the painted or carved image, the written symbol, and the printed book, that true freedom-the freedom to escape from the passing moment and the present visible place, to challenge past experience or modify future action-can be achieved. To be aware only of immediate stimuli and immediate sensations is a medical indication of brain injury.

Here was my city, immense, overpowering, flooded with energy and light... The world, at that moment , opened before me, challenging me, beckoning me, demanding something of me that it would take more than a lifetime to give, but raising all my energies by its own vivid promise to a higher pitch.

Thus the inertia of "progress" today leads swiftly downhill; while the attempt while the attempt to achieve stabilization by collective compulsion and social arrest likewise leads to the same destination--death. Only one road lies open to those who would remain human: the road of renewal. Each one of us must dedicate himself, at whatever effort, with whatever willing sacrifice, to such a transformation of himself and all the groups and associations of in which he participates, as will lead to law and order, to peace and cooperation, to love and brotherhood, throughout the planet.

Vacuum pumps driven by electric motors are forced into American households for the purpose of cleaning an obsolete form of floor covering, the carpet or the rug, whose appropriateness for use in interiors, if it did not disappear with the caravans where it originated, certainly passed out of existence with rubber heels and steam-heated houses. To count such pathetic examples of waste to the credit of the machine is like counting the rise in the number of constipation remedies a proof of the benefits of leisure.

I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, "This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!"

To accept the Church's monopoly of the subjective life, or to surrender it to muddled magic and vulgar superstition, was to set limits to the examination of human experience and the pursuit of truth. The inner life could not remain forever a no-man's land, where saints, gypsies, lords, beggars, artists, and lunatics had established squatters' rights and wasted precious human energy erecting an endless series of crazy, flimsy structures. In turning his back on the realities of subjective life, Descartes rejected the possibility of creating a unified world picture that would do justice to every aspect of human experience-that indispensable pre-condition for the 'next development of man.

If we are to prevent megatechnics from further controlling and deforming every aspect of human culture, we shall be able to do so only with the aid of a radically different model derived directly, not from machines, but from living organisms and organic complexes (ecosystems). What can be known about life only through the process of living — and so is part of even the humblest organisms — must be added to all the other aspects that can be observed, abstracted, measured. … Once an organic world picture is in the ascendant, the working aim of an economy of plenitude will be not to feed more human functions into the machine, but to develop further man's incalculable potentialities for self-actualization and self-transendence, taking back into himself deliberately many of the activities he has too supinely surrendered into the mechanical system.

Each religion is a brave guess at the authorship of Hamlet. Yet, as far as the play goes does it make any difference whether Shakespeare or Bacon wrote it? Would it make any difference to the actors if their parts happened out of nothingness, if they found themselves acting on the stage because of some gross and unpardonable accident? Would it make any difference if the playwright gave them the lines or whether they composed them themselves, so long as the lines were properly spoken? Would it make any difference to the characters if A Midsummer Night's Dream was really a dream?

...in general, the traditionalists are backward-looking, conservative; pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

Let us confess it: the human situation is always desperate.

Though human consciousness plays such a central part, and is the basis of all his creative and constructive activities, man is nevertheless no god: for his spiritual illumination and self-discovery only carry through and enlarge nature's creativity. Man's reason now informs him that even in his most inspired moments he is but a participating agent in a larger cosmic process he did not originate and can only in the most limited fashion control. Except through the expansion of his consciousness, his littleness and his loneliness remain real. Slowly, man has found out that, wonderful though his mind is, he must curb the egoistic elations and delusions it promotes; for his highest capacities are dependent upon the cooperation of a multitude of other forces and organisms, whose life-courses and life-needs must be respected.

A city that is of one man only is no city, says Haemon in Sophocles' 'Antigone.' Only where differences are valued and opposition tolerated can be transmuted into dialectic: so in its internal economy the city is a place-to twist Blake's dictum-that depresses corporeal and promotes mental war.

Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.

Every attempt to give objective reality to the billions of years the cosmos supposedly passed through before man appeared, secretly smuggles a human observer into the statement, for it is man's ability to think backwards and forwards that creates and counts and reckons with those years. Without man's time-keeping activities, the universe is yearless, as without his spatial conceptions, without his discovery of forms, patterns, rhythms, it is an insensate, formless, timeless, meaningless void. Meaning lives and dies with man, or rather, with the creative process that brought him into existence and gave him a mind.