Lewis Mumford

Philosopher, Author

1895 – 1990

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Who was Lewis Mumford?

Lewis Mumford, KBE was 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.

Mumford was also a contemporary and friend of Frank Lloyd Wright, Clarence Stein, Frederic Osborn, Edmund N. Bacon, and Vannevar Bush.

Famous Quotes:

  • Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

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Born
Oct 19, 1895
Flushing
Religion
  • Judaism
Nationality
  • United States of America
Profession
Education
  • Stuyvesant High School
  • City College of New York
Employment
  • United States Navy
    (1917 - 1918)
  • The New Yorker
    (1931 - )
Died
Jan 26, 1990
Amenia

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

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"Lewis Mumford." Biographies.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 19 Mar. 2024. <https://www.biographies.net/people/en/lewis_mumford>.

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