Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Man's Chief purpose is the creation and preservation of values that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life.
Lewis Mumford
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Giving
Economy
Chief
Men
Wisdom
Chiefs
Life
Politics
Significance
Purpose
Ultimately
Values
Civilization
Individual
Meaning
Preservation
Human
Creation
Participation
Humans
Gives
Liberalism
More quotes by Lewis Mumford
By putting business before every other manifestation of life, our mechanical and financial civilization has forgotten the chief business of life: namely, growth, reproduction, development. It pays infinite attention to the incubator-and it forgets the egg!
Lewis Mumford
War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.
Lewis Mumford
If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.
Lewis Mumford
Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
Lewis Mumford
A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility.
Lewis Mumford
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
In our entrancement with the motorcar, we have forgotten how much more efficient and how much more flexible the footwalker is.
Lewis Mumford
Faith in the creative process, in the dynamics of emergence, in the values and purposes that transcend past achievements and past forms, is the precondition of all further growth.
Lewis Mumford
Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
Lewis Mumford
For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old.
Lewis Mumford
By fashion and built-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale.
Lewis Mumford
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.
Lewis Mumford
The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans.
Lewis Mumford
Don't take the will for the deed get the deed.
Lewis Mumford
Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.
Lewis Mumford
The last step in parental love involves the release of the beloved the willing cutting of the cord that would otherwise keep the child in a state of emotional dependence.
Lewis Mumford
Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.
Lewis Mumford
Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.We effectively became time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers with the invention of the clock.
Lewis Mumford
A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.
Lewis Mumford
As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used - as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts - to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera.
Lewis Mumford