Lewis Mumford Quotes

Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.

Life is the only art that we are required to practise without preparation and without being allowed the preliminary trials the failures and botches that are essential for the training of a mere beginner.

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

Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.

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.

The artist has a special task and duty the task of reminding men of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying means of living, take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive observers: a world where people watch shadow-heroes and heroines in order to forget their own clumsiness or coldness in love, where they behold brutal men crushing out life in a strike riot, a wrestling ring or a military assault, while they lack the nerve even to resist the petty tyranny of their immediate boss: where they hysterically cheer the flag of their political state, and in their neighborhood, their trades union, their church, fail to perform the most elementary duties of citizenship.Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them and no less remote from the nature within, handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of the metropolis and by the constant specter of insecurity and death that hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets - living thus the mass of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological. They become victims of phantasms, fears, obsessions, which bind them to ancestral patterns of behavior.