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Lewis Mumford

Lewis Mumford Quotes

Historian

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Famous Lewis Mumford Quotes

“(The processes are) doubly ruinous: they impoverish the earth by hastily removing, for the benefit of a few generations, the common resources which, once expended and dissipated, can never be restored; and second, in its technique, its habits, its processes, the paleotechnic period is equally inimical to the earth considered as a human habitat, by its destruction of the beauty of the landscape, its ruining of streams, its pollution of drinking water, its filling the air with a finely divided carboniferous deposit, which chokes both life and vegetation.”

HumansEarthProcessWaterCommonGenerationsAirHabitPeriodsBenefitsResourcesDestructionDrinkingTechniqueLandscapeStreamsDividedPollutionFillingChokeHabitatDepositsDrinking WaterVegetation
Author:Lewis Mumford
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“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.”

PeopleHumansUseRunningPurposeDecisionDependsComputerUltimateDareIntuitionProgrammingReservesEfficiencyAutonomyEmployersAdaptabilityAvailabilityScrutinize
Author:Lewis Mumford
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“Before modern man can gain control over the forces that now threaten his very existence, he must resume possession of himself. This sets the chief mission for the city of the future: that of creating a visible regional and civic structure, designed to make man at home with his deeper self and his larger world, attached to images of human nature and love.”

MenWorldHumansSelfHomeForceCitiesExistenceModernHuman NatureCreatingGainsAnd LoveStructurePossessionDeeperMissionsChiefsVisibleCivicsResumesModern ManLove And Nature
Author:Lewis Mumford
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“Stieglitz conceived, though he never carried out, a series of photographs of the heads of stallions and mares, of bulls and cows, in the act of mating, hoping to catch in the brute an essential quality that would symbolize the probably unattainable photograph of a passionate human mating.”

HumansQualityEssentialsSeriesPhotographPassionateCowsBullsBrutesUnattainableMatingStallionsMares
Book:Mumford on Modern Art in the 1930s
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“Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.”

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Author:Lewis Mumford
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