Because of their origin and purpose, the meanings of art are of a different order from the operational meanings of science and technics: they relate, not to external means and consequences, but to internal transformations, and unless it produce these internal transformations the work of art is either perfunctory or dead.

Lewis Mumford

Categorized in : Art Mean Order

The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.

Lewis Mumford

dream inspirational life

Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.

Lewis Mumford

obesity traffic lanes

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

truth sight beauty

Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.

Lewis Mumford

car lovers cities

Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.

Lewis Mumford

cooking mean travel

A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.

Lewis Mumford

courage motivational inspirational

A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.

Lewis Mumford

courage men needs

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.

Lewis Mumford

different cities men

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.

Lewis Mumford

nature running art

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...

Lewis Mumford

practice life art

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.

Lewis Mumford

discipline self 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.

Lewis Mumford

availability running people

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

Lewis Mumford

flower witty funny

The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.

Lewis Mumford

mystery consciousness life-is

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.

Lewis Mumford

building cities age

If there are favourable habitats and favorable forms of association for animalsand plants, as ecology demonstrates, why not for men? If each particular natural environment has has its own balance; is there not perhaps an equivalent of this in culture?

Lewis Mumford

balance men culture

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

Lewis Mumford

humor inspirational 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.

Lewis Mumford

government real thinking

Above all we need, particularly as children, the reassuring presence of a visible community, an intimate group that enfolds us with understanding and love, and that becomes an object of our spontaneous loyalty, as a criterion and point of reference for the rest of the human race.

Lewis Mumford

loyalty race children

We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end.

Lewis Mumford

issues finals order