Lewis Mumford Quotes

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolution, the first waves of modern invention and the first wave of nuclear power. And this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be part of it-we mean to lead it.

The industrial revolution fueled all of humanity, everything we do has been exploding ever since. It's been the biggest most impacting thing, not only for human beings in the last 250 million years, but also the planet, which caused the ice age, which buried the forest. It's this circle because of the industrial revolution, it's neither good or bad, it enabled all of modernization, extended our life, it changed everything. It's the most impactful thing that happened to the planet and the people.

The world is poised on the cusp of an economic and cultural shift as dramatic as that of the Industrial Revolution.

The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering - that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good.

Science has gone a long way toward helping man to free himself from the burden of hard labor; yet, science itself is not a liberator. It creates means, not goals. It is up to men to utilize those means to achieve reasonable goals.

The progress and civilisation of the human race simply mean controlling this nature.

O, mighty, divinely delimited wisdom of walls, boundaries! I is perhaps the most magnificent of all inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he build the first wall. Men ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when, by means of that wall, we isolated our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals.

I would see my hometown, Los Angeles, change. Green space and orange groves gave way to cement, freeways flooded with traffic, and air pollution, all in the name of "progress." I felt like I was losing my home. It had a profound effect on me, and I realized just how important nature was to my spirit, my soul, my point of view.

In the developed world, technological progress means that you can have a situation where there's growth, where there's a way in which everybody can be better off over time.

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live.

Not every advance is progress. Not every new thing is better for us humanly.

How great seems human progress when we consider where it began, and how insignificant, when we contemplate the goals for which itstrives.

Sing your praise of progress and the doom machine, the naked truth is still taboo whenever it can be seen.

The substitution of the internal combustion engine for the horse marked a very gloomy milestone in the progress of mankind.

Technology and production can be great benefactors of man, but they are mindless instruments, and if undirected they careen along with a momentum of their own. In our country, they pulverize everything in their path - the landscape, the natural environment.

The 20th century ended with a single surviving model of human progress.

Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.

The progress of the world means more enjoyment and more misery too.

I think we overrate ourselves in terms of our abilities and capacities. I mean, just because you can build a really swell bridge doesn't, to my way of thinking, mean that you're an advanced civilization.

Our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life was short and brutish. It wasn't because we didn't have good politicians; we had some really good politicians. But then we started inventing - electricity, steam engines, microprocessors, understanding genetics and medicine and things like that. Yes, stability and education are important - I'm not taking anything away from that - but innovation is the real driver of progress.

What does it mean for a civilisation to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilisation is a few hundred years old ... an advanced civilisation millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bushbaby or a macaque

We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years, but if we want to continue, our future is in space.

I believe more than ever, machines will put new challenges, and that means we'll have to be more creative and more human, because that's the way to make the difference.

Science has radically changed the conditions of human life on earth. It has expanded our knowledge and our power, but not our capacity to use them with wisdom.

Apollo wasn't just about sending people into space. It transformed so much of our economy. From our education system to so many of the things we use today, it was a vision that led to the total transformation of the planet.