5 Lewis Mumford Quotes on Progress

Lewis Mumford quotes on progress

2. 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.

13. Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.

14. However far modern science and technics have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson: Nothing is impossible.

31. The physical lot of surviving workers had notably improved, with unemployment insurance, social security, and the new health services, while their children's school education was assured by the government-operated schools: in addition, they had, for intellectual or emotional stimulus and diversion, the radio and the television. But the work itself was no longer as various, as interesting, or as sustaining to the personality...

42. 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.