“ Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past. ”
- Lewis Mumford- Copy
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“ Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations, threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a oncedivine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might b e in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that h as now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual co st to life. Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometimes actively disobedient servomechanisms, still human enough to harbor purposes that do not always coincide with those of the system. Like the earliest form of authoritarian technics, this new technology is marvellously dynamic and productive: its power in every form tends to increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and defeat control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientific knowledge or of industrial assembly lines. To maximize energy, speed, or automation, without reference to the complex conditions that sustain organic life, have become ends in themselves. As with the earliest forms of authoritarian technics, the weight of effort, if one is to judge by national budgets, is toward absolute instruments of destruction, designed for absolutely irrational purposes whose chief byproduct would be the mutilation or extermination of the human race. Even Ashurbanipal and Genghis Khan performed their gory operations under normal human limits. The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible personality, an allpowerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented. Like the Pharoahs of the Pyramid Age, these servants of the system identify its goods with their own kind of wellbeing: as with the divine king, their praise of the system is an act of selfworship; and again like the king, they are in the grip of an irrational compulsion to extend their means of control and expand the scope of their authority. In this new systemscentered collective, this Pentagon of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike job's God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated. ”
- Lewis Mumford- Copy
- 2.3K
“ Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends. ”
- Lewis Mumford- Copy
- 1.6K
“ 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- Copy
- 3.6K
“ 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- Copy
- 269
“ 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. ”
- Lewis Mumford- Copy
- 2.9K
“ 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- Copy
- 112
“ 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- Copy
- 1.9K
“ The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon. ”
- Lewis Mumford- Copy
- 2.2K
“ Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past. ”
- Lewis Mumford- Copy
- 2.4K
“ Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past. ”
- Lewis Mumford- Copy
- 2.3K
“ Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past. ”
- Lewis Mumford- Copy
- 2.6K
“ 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- Copy
- 173
“ 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- Copy
- 3.3K
“ 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- Copy
- 997
“ 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. ”
- Lewis Mumford- Copy
- 2.2K
“ To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity. ”
- Lewis Mumford- Copy
- 1.8K
“ 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. ”
- Lewis Mumford- Copy
- 3.8K
“ To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity. ”
- Lewis Mumford- Copy
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“ New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city. ”
- Lewis Mumford- Copy
- 718
“ 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 conditioned mind. ”
- Lewis Mumford- Copy
- 3.1K
“ The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live. ”
- Lewis Mumford- Copy
- 2.5K
“ By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed. ”
- Lewis Mumford- Copy
- 141
“ The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon. ”
- Lewis Mumford- Copy
- 1.8K
“ 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. ”
- Lewis Mumford- Copy
- 3.8K
“ Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends. ”
- Lewis Mumford- Copy
- 3.2K
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