Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past. – Lewis Mumford
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
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 training. – Lewis Mumford
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