Famous Quotes

Quotes by Lewis Mumford

• A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.
• A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.
• Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.
• However far modern science and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson nothing is impossible.
• 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 training.
• One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.
• Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
• Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.
• The artist does not illustrate science (but) he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does.
• The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.
• 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.
• 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.
• Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
• War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
• Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.