Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
LEWIS MUMFORDGrowth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
LEWIS MUMFORDLife 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…
LEWIS MUMFORDIf we never met again in our lives I should feel that somehow the whole adventure of existence was justified by my having met you.
LEWIS MUMFORDSafety razors make it hard to grow beards in America: America would be a better place if there were a few bearded, savage, terrible old men.
LEWIS MUMFORDThe artist does not illustrate science; … [but] he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does, and expresses by a visual synthesis what the scientist converts into analytical formulae or experimental demonstrations.
LEWIS MUMFORDThe 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 MUMFORDNothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
LEWIS MUMFORDThe 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 MUMFORDHenceforward, I shout to the heavens, I shall deliver no more lectures on behalf of good causes: I am the good cause that denies the need for such lectures. Avaunt, importuning world! Back to my cell.
LEWIS MUMFORDEvery work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.
LEWIS MUMFORDFor most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old.
LEWIS MUMFORDEach person is a temporary focus of forces, vitalities, and values that carry back to an immemorial past and that reach forward into an unthinkable future.
LEWIS MUMFORDHumor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
LEWIS MUMFORDThe 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 MUMFORDThe 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.
LEWIS MUMFORDOur national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
LEWIS MUMFORD