List of Lewis Mumford Quotes

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.

The Physical Lot Of Surviving Workers Had Notably Improved, With Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, And The New Health Services, While Their Children's School Education Was Assured By The Government-operated Schools: In Addition, They Had, For Intellectual Or Emotional Stimulus And Diversion, The Radio And The Television. But The Work Itself Was No Longer As Various, As Interesting, Or As Sustaining To The Personality.

One's Worst Enormities Remain Within, And It Is Only One's Vulgar Commonplaces Of Error And Folly That Turn Into Murders And Suicides, Treasons, Infidelities, And Betrayals.

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.

Utopias Rest On The Fallacy That Perfection Is A Legitimate Goal Of Human Existence.

Without Leisure There Can Be Neither Art Nor Science Nor Fine Conversation, Nor Any Ceremonious Performance Of The Offices Of Love And Friendship.

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!

Chaos, If It Does Not Harden Into A Pattern Of Disorder, May Be More Fruitful Than A Regularity Too Easily Accepted And A Success Too Easily Achieved.

Henceforward, I Shout To The Heavens, I Shall Deliver No More Lectures On Behalf Of Good Causes: I Am The Good Cause That Denies The Need For Such Lectures. Avaunt, Importuning World! Back To My Cell.

Nothing Endures Except Life: The Capacity For Birth, Growth, And Renewal.

It Was Stieglitz's Endeavor... To Translate The Unseen World Of Tactile Values As They Develop Between Lovers Not Merely Into The Sexual Act But The Entire Relation Of Two Personalities - To Translate This World Of Blind Touch Into Sight.

Safety Razors Make It Hard To Grow Beards In America: America Would Be A Better Place If There Were A Few Bearded, Savage, Terrible Old Men.