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 More Quotes by Lewis Mumford More Quotes From Lewis Mumford 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 toys writing men The very people who shudder over the cruelty of the hunter are apt to forget that slaughter, in the grimmest sense of the word, is a process they entrust daily to the butcher; and that unlike the game of the forests, even the dumbest creatures of the slaughterhouse know what is in store for them. Lewis Mumford games animal people Do you want to know what I most regret about my youth? That I didn't dream more boldly and demand of myself more impossible things; for all one does in maturity is to carve in granite or porphyry the soap bubble one blew in youth! Oh to have dreamed harder! Lewis Mumford maturity regret dream The final goal of human effort is man's self-transforma tion. Lewis Mumford goal self men Not sense data or atoms or electrons or packets of energy, but purposes, interests, and meanings, constitute the underlying facts of human experience. Lewis Mumford data experience energy Happiness, I think, lies on the surface... when one plunges under the surface all the buoyant things disappear, and the farther down one gets the more cold and dark it seems: and the more oppressive space feels. Lewis Mumford dark happiness lying Without leisure there can be neither art nor science nor fine conversation, nor any ceremonious performance of the offices of love and friendship. Lewis Mumford love-and-friendship office art We have lost faith in the formal powers of the mind, not, as some suppose, because our universe is too difficult to grasp, but because we lack the inner principle of order. Lewis Mumford principles mind order Each one of us, as long as life stirs is us, may play a part in extricating ourselves from the power system by asserting our primacy as people in quiet acts of mental or physical withdrawal-in gestures of non-conformity, in abstentions, restrictions, inhibitions, which will liberate us from the domination of the pentagon of power. Lewis Mumford play long people Chaos, if it does not harden into a pattern of disorder, may be more fruitful than a regularity too easily accepted and a success too easily achieved. Lewis Mumford patterns doe may Trend is not destiny. Lewis Mumford trends destiny It was Stieglitz's endeavor... to translate the unseen world of tactile values as they develop between lovers not merely into the sexual act but the entire relation of two personalities - to translate this world of blind touch into sight. Lewis Mumford personality sight two If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul. Lewis Mumford machines soul self This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid. Lewis Mumford ink real blood The self holds both a hell and a heaven. Lewis Mumford hell self heaven Deliberately, on every historic occasion, we piously fake events for the benefit of photographers, while the actual event often occurs in a different fashion; and we have the effrontery to call these artful dress rehearsals authentic historic documents. Lewis Mumford fake events fashion The mind reproduces itself by transmitting its symbols to other intermediaries, human and mechanical, than the particular brain that first assembled them. Lewis Mumford mind brain firsts By putting business before every other manifestation of life, our mechanical and financial civilization has forgotten the chief business of life: namely, growth, reproduction, development. It pays infinite attention to the incubator-and it forgets the egg! Lewis Mumford growth eggs civilization 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. Lewis Mumford passionate quality essentials As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used - as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts - to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera. Lewis Mumford quilts crazy photography
