169 Quotes by Lewis Mumford

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.

Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.

Everyone aimed at security: no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before the barbarian invasions had done their work, long before economic dislocations became serious, was inner go. Rome’s life was now an imitation of life: a mere holding on. Security was the watchword – as if life knew any other stability than through constant change, or any form of security except through a constant willingness to take risks

A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.

Adventure is humdrum and routine unless one assimilates it, unless one relates it to a central core which grows within and gives it contour and significance. Raw experience is empty, just as empty as the forecastle of a whaler as in a chamber of a counting house; for it is not what one does, but in a manifold sense, what one realizes that keeps existence from being vain and trivial.

Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.

A Society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure and to another all the burdens of work condemns both classes to spiritual sterility.

Life 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 training.