Lewis Mumford
Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.Collection: Travel
However far modern science and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson; nothing is impossible.Collection: Science
To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.Collection: Art
A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.Collection: Courage
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.Collection: Truth
A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.Collection: Brainy
One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.Collection: Intelligence
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.Collection: Funny
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.Collection: Government
Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.Collection: Car
Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
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 artist does not illustrate science (but) he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does.
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.
The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.
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.
Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.
Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.
Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.
War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
Don't take the will for the deed; get the deed.
New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.
Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.
The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.
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.
Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
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.
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.
Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.Collection: Obesity
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 itselfCollection: Color
Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.Collection: Men
The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans.Collection: Ideas
Trend is not destiny.Collection: Destiny
A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility.Collection: Spiritual
A picture was once a rare sort of symbol, rare enough to call for attentive concentration. Now it is the actual experience that is rare, and the picture has become ubiquitous.Collection: Enough
The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.Collection: Running
Organic planning does not begin with a preconceived goal; it moves from need to need, from opportunity to opportunity, in a series of adaptations that themselves become increasingly coherent and purposeful, so that they generate a complex final design, hardly less unified than a pre-formed geometric pattern.Collection: Moving
Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.Collection: Architecture
If we never met again in our lives I should feel that somehow the whole adventure of existence was justified by my having met you.Collection: Adventure
When cities were first founded, an old Egyptian scribe tells us, the mission of the founder was to 'put gods in their shrines.' The task of the coming city is not essentially different: its mission is to put the highest concerns of man at the center of all his activities.Collection: Men
The life-efficiency and adaptability of the computer must be questioned. Its judicious use depends upon the availability of its human employers quite literally to keep their own heads, not merely to scrutinize the programming but to reserve for themselves the right of ultimate decision. No automatic system can be intelligently run byautomatonsor by people who dare not assert human intuition, human autonomy, human purpose.Collection: Running
The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city.Collection: Cities
The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.Collection: Mystery
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 the training...Collection: Life
The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.Collection: Memories
While a great many other ideas and measures are of prime importance for the good life of the community, that which concerns its architectural expression is the notion of the community as limited in numbers, and in area... To express these relations clearly, to embody them in buildings and roads and gardens in which each individual structure will be subordinated to the whole - this is the end of community planning.Collection: Good Life
In vulgar usage, progress has come to mean limitless movement in space and time, accompanied, necessarily, by an equally limitless command of energy: culminating in limitless destruction.Collection: Mean
War is a specific product of civilization.Collection: War