Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.
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…
More Lewis Mumford Quotes
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Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
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.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
Safety 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 MUMFORD -
Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
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…
LEWIS MUMFORD -
New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
The 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 MUMFORD -
In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.
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 -
Henceforward, 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 MUMFORD -
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 -
If 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 MUMFORD -
The self holds both a hell and a heaven.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.
LEWIS MUMFORD