169 Quotes by Lewis Mumford

Don’t take the will for the deed; get the deed.

That technics has often lagged behind culture, that the efficiency of the assembly line, for example, might be, humanly speaking, a mark of social backwardness, seems never to have occurred to the exponents of unqualified technological progress.

Idealism and science continue to function in separate compartments; and yet ‘the happiness of man on earth’ depends upon their combination.

Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and “the going becomes the goal.”

Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.

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.”

Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life’s further development.

I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, “This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!”

As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used – as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts – to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera.