Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford, KBEwas an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer. Mumford was influenced by the work of Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes and worked closely with his associate the British sociologist Victor Branford...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSociologist
Date of Birth19 October 1895
CountryUnited States of America
goal perfection utopia
Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.
goal progress lines
Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century
color goal personality
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
moving opportunity goal
Organic planning does not begin with a preconceived goal; it moves from need to need, from opportunity to opportunity, in a series of adaptations that themselves become increasingly coherent and purposeful, so that they generate a complex final design, hardly less unified than a pre-formed geometric pattern.
men self goal
The final goal of human effort is man's self-transforma tion.
fashion mean goal
Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal." Even more unfortunately, the industries that are favored by such expansion must, to maintain their output, be devoted to goods that are readily consumable either by their nature, or because they are so shoddily fabricated that they must soon be replaced. By fashion and built-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale.
american-sociologist frequently illustrate responds science scientist
The artist does not illustrate science (but) he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does.
new-york manhattan pavement
He who touches the soil of Manhattan and the pavement of New York, touches, whenever he knows or not, Walt Whitman.
real thinking government
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.
abyss boredom classes devices earlier inventing labor man modern privileged success
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
art becoming transformation
The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.
time cutting reality
The convenience of timekeeping is greatly overrated; and the people who practice it so faithfully that they lose the capacity for appreciating the fixed and the static and the spatially related experiences cut themselves off from a good part of reality.
men hair switzerland
Geneva has the sleepy tidiness of a man who combs his hair while yet in his pyjamas.
order mind principles
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.