169 Quotes by Lewis Mumford

Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

Life is an art we are required to practice without preparation, a score that we play at sight even before we have mastered our instruments.

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.

The last step in parental love involves the release of the beloved; the willing cutting of the cord that would otherwise keep the child in a state of emotional dependence.

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

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

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

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

When art seems to be empty of meaning, as no doubt some of the abstract painting of our own day actually does seem, what the painting says, indeed what the artist is shrieking at the top of his voice, is that life has become empty of all rational content and coherence, and that, in times like these, is far from a meaningless statement.