Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
LEWIS MUMFORDGrowth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
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 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 MUMFORDEvery 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 MUMFORDIn war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.
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 MUMFORDThe self holds both a hell and a heaven.
LEWIS MUMFORDTo curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.
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 MUMFORDEvery work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.
LEWIS MUMFORDOur national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
LEWIS MUMFORDNew York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
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 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 MUMFORDHumor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
LEWIS MUMFORD