Lewis Mumford Quotes

The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.

Now, the desire for money, Thomas Aquinas pointed out, knows no limits, whereas all natural wealth, represented in the concrete form of food, clothing, furniture, houses, gardens, fields, has definite limits of production and consumption, fixed by the nature of the commodity and the organic needs and capacities of the user. The idea that there should be no limits upon any human function is absurd: all life exists within very narrow limits of temperature, air, water, food; and the notion that money alone, or power to command the services of other men, should be free of such definite limits is an aberration of the mind.

Significantly, it was during the third dynasty of Ur-a period of viogorous constructive activity-that all the kings except the founder claimed divinity. This evidence decisively couples divine kingship with the characteristic public works program of the megamachine. Little tasks might still be left to little men, but big tasks belonged to the king by reason of the special powers he commanded: above all, the unique power to create a colossal labor machine.

The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.

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.

If Leonardo's example of diversification had been more widely followed, the whole tempo of mechanical and scientific development would have been slowed down. This means that the pace of change might have been established in relation to human need, and that valuable parts of man's cultural heritage might have been kept alive, instead of being ruthlessly extirpated in order to widen the empire of the machine. Instead of rapid advances, on the basis of uncoordinated knowledge, in specialized departments, mainly those concerned with war and economic exploitation, there would have been the possibility of a slower but better-coordinated advance that did justice to the processes, functions, and purposes of life.

This essential coalition between royal military power and often dubious supernatural authority anticipated a similar alliance between the scientists and mathematical games theorists with the higher agents of government today, and was subject to similar corruptions, miscalculations, and hallucinations.

Galileo's mechanical world was only a partial representation of a finite number of probable worlds, each peculiar to a particular living species; and all these worlds are but a portion of the infinite number of possible worlds that may have once existed or may yet exist. But anything like a single world, common to all species, at all times, under all circumstances, is a purely hypothetical construction, drawn by inference from pathetically insufficient data, prized for the assurance of stability and intelligibility it gives, even though that assurance turns out, under severe examination, to be just another illusion. A butterfly or a beetle, a fish or a fowl, a dog or a dolphin, would have a different report to give even about primary qualities, for each lives in a world conditioned by the needs and environmental opportunities open to his species. In the gray visual world of the dog, smells, near and distant, subtle or violently exciting, probably play the part that colors do in man's world-though in the primal occupation of eating, the dog's world and man's world would approach each other more closely.

But if tools were actually central to mental growth beyond purely animal needs, how is it that those primitive peoples, like the Australian Bushmen, who have the most rudimentary technology, nevertheless exhibit elaborate religious ceremonials, an extremely complicated kinship organization, and a complex and differentiated language? Why, further, were highly developed cultures, like those of the Maya, the Aztecs, the Peruvians, still using only the simplest handicraft equipment, though they were capable of constructing superbly planned works of engineering and architecture, like the road to Machu Pichu and Machu Pichu itself? And how is it that the Maya, who had neither machines nor draught animals, were not only great artists but masters of abstruse mathematical calculations.

The masters of the underground citadel are committed to a 'war' they cannot bring to an end, with weapons whose ultimate effects they cannot control, for purposes that they cannot accomplish.

Material artifacts may stubbornly defy time, but what they tell about man's history is a good deal less than the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If the only clue to Shakespeare's achievement as a dramatist were his cradle, an Elizabethan mug, his lower jaw, and a few rotted planks from the Globe Theatre, one could not even dimly imagine the subject matter of his plays, still less guess in one's wildest moments what a poet he was. Though we would still be far from justly appreciating Shakespeare, we should nevertheless have a better notion of his work through examining the known plays of Shaw and Yeats and reading backward.

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.

Loving underlies effective learning: indeed, it is the basis of all cultural transference and interchange. No teaching machine can supply this.

Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.

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