The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity. Lewis Mumford More Quotes by Lewis Mumford More Quotes From Lewis Mumford If we never met again in our lives I should feel that somehow the whole adventure of existence was justified by my having met you. Lewis Mumford justified should adventure 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. Lewis Mumford progress space mean 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. Lewis Mumford house adventure giving To the extent that the scientist's capacity for pursuing the truth depends upon costly apparatus, institutional collaboration and heavy capital investment by government or industry he is no longer his own master. Lewis Mumford investment collaboration government Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals. Lewis Mumford expression dream art Each religion is a brave guess at the authorship of Hamlet. Yet, as far as the play goes, does it make any difference whether Shakespeare or Bacon wrote it? Would it make any difference to the actors if their parts happened out of nothingness, if they found themselves acting on the stage because of some gross and unpardonable accident? Would it make any difference if the playwright gave them the lines or whether they composed them themselves, so long as the lines were properly spoken? Would it make any difference to the characters if 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' was really a dream? Lewis Mumford god dream character Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated. Lewis Mumford transformation growth self What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself Lewis Mumford color goal personality Integration proceeds by just the opposite route: a deliberate heightening of every organic function; a release of impulses from circumstances that irrationally thwarted them; richer and more complex patterns of activity; an esthetic heightening of anticipated realizations; a steady lengthening of the future; a faith in cosmic perspectives. Lewis Mumford faith opposites love To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity. Lewis Mumford machines opportunity art Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten. Lewis Mumford elderly littles life Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense. Lewis Mumford skills sports order 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 order mean art In its revolt against congestion and sordor, a space-hungry generation has, I fear, developed eyes that are bigger than its stomach. Lewis Mumford generations space eye The earth is the Lord's fullness thereof: this is no longer a hollow dictum of religion, but a directive for economic action toward human brotherhood. Lewis Mumford brotherhood humanity earth The humanities and science are not in inherent conflict but have become separated in the twentieth century. Now their essential unity must be re-emphasized, so that twentieth-century multiplicity may become twentieth-century unity. Lewis Mumford unity essentials humanity Each person is a temporary focus of forces, vitalities, and values that carry back to an immemorial past and that reach forward into an unthinkable future. Lewis Mumford thought-provoking focus past 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 spiritual running long 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 progress limits goal Order and creativity are complementary. Lewis Mumford chaos creativity order
