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.
- Lewis Mumford Quote

A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.
- Lewis Mumford Quote

Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
- Lewis Mumford Quote

Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act.
- Lewis Mumford Quote

Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.
- Lewis Mumford Quote

However far modern science and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson; nothing is impossible.
- Lewis Mumford Quote

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.
- Lewis Mumford Quote

New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
- Lewis Mumford Quote

One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.
- Lewis Mumford Quote

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
- Lewis Mumford Quote

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

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.
- Lewis Mumford Quote

The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
- Lewis Mumford Quote

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.
- Lewis Mumford Quote

The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion.
- Lewis Mumford Quote

To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.
- Lewis Mumford Quote

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

Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
- Lewis Mumford Quote

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
- Lewis Mumford Quote