169 Quotes by Lewis Mumford

It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man’s principal toy and tool: without the meanings and values it sustains, all man’s other tools would be worthless.

What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself.

The earth is the Lord’s fullness thereof: this is no longer a hollow dictum of religion, but a directive for economic action toward human brotherhood.

To the extent that the scientist’s capacity for pursuing the truth depends upon costly apparatus, institutional collaboration and heavy capital investment by government or industry he is no longer his own master.

The final goal of human effort is man’s self-transforma tion.

Do you want to know what I most regret about my youth? That I didn’t dream more boldly and demand of myself more impossible things; for all one does in maturity is to carve in granite or porphyry the soap bubble one blew in youth! Oh to have dreamed harder!

Primitive man’s life in Hobbes’ famous words, was short, brutish, and nasty; and this very savagery and anxiety became the justification for an absolute order established, like Descartes’ ideal world, by a single providential mind and will: that of the absolute ruler or monarch. Until men were incorporated into Leviathan, that is, the all-powerful state through which the king’s will was carried out, they were dangerous to their fellows and a burden to themselves.

Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.

Even in the eighteenth century, before either the French Revolution or the paleotechnic revolution had been consummated, it had become the fashion to discredit municipal authorities and to sneer at local interests. In the newly organized states, even those based on republican principles, only matters of national moment, organized by political parties, counted in men’s hopes or dreams.