169 Quotes by Lewis Mumford

Con i mezzi di comunicazione di massa su grandi distanze, l'isolamento della popolazione si è rivelato un mezzo di controllo molto efficace.

Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.

Toute transformation sociale (...) s'est fondée sur de nouvelles bases métaphysiques et idéologiques; ou plutôt, sur des émotions et intuitions plus profondes, dont l'expression rationalisée prend la forme du cosmos et de la nature de l'homme.

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.

Only when love takes the lead will the earth, and life on earth, be safe again. And not until then.

A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.

A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.

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.

Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.