169 Quotes by 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.

I’m a pessimist about probabilities; I’m an optimist about possibilities.

Not how long you live, but how much you have lived, how much meaning your life has absorbed and passed on, is what matters.

To have a life that is in any way detached from the megatechnic complex, to say nothing of being cockily independent of it, or recalcitrant to its demands, is regarded as nothing less than a form of sabotage. Hence the fury evoked by the Hippies-quite apart from any objectionable behavior. On megatechnic terms complete withdrawal is heresy and treason, if not evidence of unsound mind. The arch-enemy of the Affluent Economy would not be Karl Marx but Henry Thoreau.

The word ‘year’ is meaningless as applied to a physical system by itself: it is not the stars or the planets that experience years, still less measure them, but man. This very observation is the result of man’s attention to recurrent movements, seasonable events, biological rhythms, measurable sequences. When the idea of a year is projected back upon the physical universe, it tells something further that is important to man: otherwise, it is a poetic fiction.

One’s worst enormities remain within, and it is only one’s vulgar commonplaces of error and folly that turn into murders and suicides, treasons, infidelities, and betrayals.

Creativity begins in the unconscious; and its first human manifestation is the dream.

Ritual, art, poesy, drama, music, dance, philosophy, science, myth, religion are all as essential to man as his daily bread: man’s true life consists not alone in the work activities that directly sustain him, but in the symbolic activities which give significance both to the processes of work and their ultimate products and consummations.

When cities were first founded, an old Egyptian scribe tells us, the mission of the founder was to ‘put gods in their shrines.’ The task of the coming city is not essentially different: its mission is to put the highest concerns of man at the center of all his activities.