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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!

Lewis Mumford

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Lewis Mumford
Age: 94 †
Born: 1895
Born: October 19
Died: 1990
Died: January 26
Architect
Architectural Theoretician
Historian
Historian Of Technology
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Flushing
Long Island
Happy
Pass
Reluctantly
Words
None
Predicted
Ever
Personality
Tombstone
Things
Fool
Disastrous
Would
Knew
Assessment
Men
Written
Aging
Came
Absolutes
Dies
Absolute

More quotes by Lewis Mumford

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Neither democracy nor effective representation is possible until each participant in the group...devotes a measurable part of his life to furthering its existence.
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Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.
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Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day.
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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 the training...
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A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.
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In our entrancement with the motorcar, we have forgotten how much more efficient and how much more flexible the footwalker is.
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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.
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Without leisure there can be neither art nor science nor fine conversation, nor any ceremonious performance of the offices of love and friendship.
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A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.
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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
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One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.
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The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.
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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
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Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.
Lewis Mumford
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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
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Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.
Lewis Mumford
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Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.
Lewis Mumford
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Chaos, if it does not harden into a pattern of disorder, may be more fruitful than a regularity too easily accepted and a success too easily achieved.
Lewis Mumford
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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
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The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.
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