A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.

Lewis Mumford

Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.

Lewis Mumford

I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, "This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!"

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

New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.

Lewis Mumford

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

Lewis Mumford

Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.

Lewis Mumford

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.

Lewis Mumford

Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.

Lewis Mumford