The City in History Quotes

“In a sense the dramatic dialogue is both the fullest symbol and the final justification of the city's life. For the same reason, the most revealing symbol of the city's failure, of its very non-existence as a social personality, is the absence of dialogue-not necessarily a silence, but equally the loud sound of a chorus uttering the same words in cowed if complacent conformity. The silence of a dead city has more dignity than the vocalisms of a community that knows neither detachment nor dialectic opposition, neither ironic comment nor stimulating disparity, neither an intelligent conflict nor an active moral resolution. Such a drama is bound to have a fatal last act.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“A good pursued too inflexibly may turn into a granite evil.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“A city that is of one man only is no city, says Haemon in Sophocles' 'Antigone.' Only where differences are valued and opposition tolerated can be transmuted into dialectic: so in its internal economy the city is a place-to twist Blake's dictum-that depresses corporeal and promotes mental war.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“Creativity is, by its nature, fitful and inconstant, easily upset by constraint, foreboding, insecurity, external pressure. Any great preoccupation with the problems of ensuring animal survival exhausts the energies and disturbs the receptivity of the sensitive mind. Such creativity as was first achieved in the city came about largely through an arrogation of the economic means of production and distribution by a small minority, attached to the temple and the palace. In the epic of creation Marduk remarks of man: "Let him be burdened with the toil of the gods that they may freely breathe." Shall we err greatly if we translate this as: "Let our subjects be burdened with daily toil that the king and the priesthood may freely breathe"?”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“But what one finds in the New World os not just a collection of houses and buildings, which might have had the same common ancestor in the mesolithic hamlet. One discovers, rather, a parallel collection of cultural traits: highly developed fertility ceremonies, a pantheon of cosmic deities, a magnified ruler and central authority who personifies the whole community, great temples whose forms recall such functionally different structures as the pyramid and the ziggurat, along with the same domination of a peasantry by an original hunter-warrior group, or (among the early Mayas) an even more ancient priesthood. Likewise the same division of castes and specialization of vocational groups, and the beginnings of writing, time measuring, and the calendar-including an immense extension of time perspectives among the Mayas, which surpasses in complexity and accuracy even what we know of the cosmic periods of the Babylonians and the Egyptians. These traits seem too specific to have been spontaneously repeated in a whole constellation.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“In both the old and the new quarters a pitch of foulness and filth was reached that the lowest serf's cottage scarcely achieved in medieval Europe. It is almost impossible to enumerate objectively the bare details of this housing without being suspected of perverse exaggeration. But those who speak glibly of urban improvements during this period, or of the alleged rise in the standards of living, fight shy of the actual facts: they generously impute to the town as a whole benefits which only the more favored middle-class minority enjoyed; and they read into the original conditions those improvements which three generations of active legislation and massive sanitary engineering have finally brought about.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“What was atrocious was the fact that, like every other building in the new towns, they were dumped almost at random; the leakage of escaping gas scented the so-called gas-house districts, and not surprisingly these districts frequently became among the most degraded sections of the city. Towering above the town, polluting its air, the gas tanks symbolized the dominance of 'practical' interests over life-needs.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“Presently the recruiting sergeant was not able to use the children of this regime even as cannon fodder: the Boer War and the First World War, did perhaps as much as any other factor to promote better housing there.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“The masters of the underground citadel are committed to a 'war' they cannot bring to an end, with weapons whose ultimate effects they cannot control, for purposes that they cannot accomplish.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“Con i mezzi di comunicazione di massa su grandi distanze, l'isolamento della popolazione si è rivelato un mezzo di controllo molto efficace.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“Agamemnon reproached Clytemnestra for her servile effusiveness of speech: "As a man, not as a god, let me be honored." The delusion of divinity in a ruler was a product of their civic decadence.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“Lonely courage played a part that mass obedience to the leader's command could never rival. Such courage produced heroes of the mind as well as of the battlefield, often in the same person.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“The Greek poleis in their best days had no great surplus of goods: what they had was a surplus of time, that is, leisure, free and untrammeled, not commited-as in America today-to excessive materialistic consumption, but available for conversation, sexual passion, intellectual reflection, and esthetic delight.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“Supreme in every department except colonization, Athens was the embodiment of all these fresh promises. But while Athens created a cultural legacy to which every succeeding age has been indebted, it sought to pre-empt for its own vainglory the goods that every other city had contributed to, and had a right to equally share in. Though conserving, indeed cultivating, the benefits of internal democracy, Athens chose to act the king among lesser cities, demanding homage and tribute, in tyrannous fashion, in return for protection. The excrement of early civilization-war, exploitation, enslavement, mass extermination-backed up on Athens, as from an ancient sewer. In the end these forces overcame a movement toward a wider fellowship, with more humane goals, that was already visible in the seventh century. Had Greece's intellectual leaders fully grasped the implications of this universalism, they might have liberated urban culture from its chronic involvement in the practice of human sacrifice for perverse and irrational ends.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“As the city developed, the democratic habits of the village would be often carried into its heretofore specialized activities, with a constant rotation of human functions and civic duties, and with a full participation by each citizen in every aspect of the common life. This sparse material culture, in many places little better than a subsistence regimen, gave rise to a new kind of economy of abundance, for it opened up virgin territories of mind and spirit that had hardly been explored, let alone cultivated. The result was not merely a torrential outpouring of ideas and images in drama, poetry, sculpture, painting, logic, mathematics, and philosophy; but a collective life more highly energized, more heightened in its capacity for esthetic expression and rational evaluation, than had ever been achieved before. Within a couple of centuries the Greeks discovered more about the nature and potentialities of man than the Egyptians or the Sumerians seem to have discovered in as many millenia. All these achievements were concentrated in the Greek polis, and in particular, in the greatest of these cities, Athens.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“Heaven and Utopia both had a place in the structure of ancient cities; yet to the extent that the best human plans may miscarry and the most successful human dreams may, through their very success, succumb to internal perversities, Hell became part of the formative structure, too. The resulting material form often outlasted the ideal that originally quickened it: as is the fashion of containers, old buildings and public ways may serve, with minor changes, to hold a new dream. But that is a late development. So important was the symbol itself for early urban rulers, that more than one city was razed to the ground, to be rebuilt again by the destroyer on the same site. No rule of common sense or economics can explain that.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“Private property begins, not as Prodhoun thought with robbery, but with the treatment of all common property as the private possession of the king, whose life and welfare were identified with that of the community. Property was an extension and enlargement of his own personality, as the unique representative of the collective whole. But once this claim was accepted, property could for the first time be alienated, that is, removed from the community by the individual gift of the king.

This conception of the royal possessions remained in its original form well past the time of Louis XIV. That Sun King, a little uneasy over the heavy taxes he desired to impose, called together the learned Doctors of Paris to decide if his exactions were morally justifiable. Their theology was equal to the occassion. They explained that the entire realm was his by divine right: hence in laying on these new taxes he was only taxing himself. This prerogative was passed on, undefiled, to the 'sovereign state, ' which in emergencies falls back, without scruple, on ancient magic and myth.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“In the change-over from the village to the city, there is some further confirmation of this reading of communal ways: for the land and all it brought forth became the property of the temple and the god; even the peasants who worked it belonged to the temple, and all the other members of the community belonged to the land, too, and were obliged to give part of their labor to the common tasks of digging and embanking and building. These posessions, with the extension of the secular powers of kingship, would become the royal estate; and identification of the common domain with the sovereign power sank so deep that even in modern states most sharply conscious of the rights of private property, the state itself is the ultimate owner and residuary legatee, with that power to commandeer and to tax which is ultimately the power to possess or destroy.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“The city thus at an early date recaptured the polymorphism of the insect hive: by social means it achieved the equivalent of the physiological differentiations that accompany the integration of insect societies. True, thus division of labor allowed for far greater internal mobility than insect communities know. Even prostitution, though it condemned a whole class to the drudgeries of sexual intercourse, never reached the point of creating a single class of sexual breeders, segregated for childbearing. (That horror possibly awaits the triumph of Post-historic Man.) Nevertheless, the parallel between human and insect societies applies even to the working life; for within a single lifetime the differences between vocations still cause characteristic diseases and disabilities, even changes in bodily structure. These differences still affect the death rate and the span of life of each major occupation.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“By remaining non-specialized, man opened up a thousand fresh paths for his own further development.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“By the time Herodotus visited Egypt in the fifth century B.C., the over-all division of labor and the minute subdivision into specialisms had reached a point comparable to that which it has come to again in our own time; for he records that "some physicians are for the eyes, others for the head, others for the teeth, others for the belly, and others for internal disorders.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“In early communities, labor itself is a part-time activity, impossible to segregate completely from other functions of life, like religion, play, communal intercourse, even sexuality. In the city specialized work became for the first time an all-day, year-round occupation. As a result, the specialized worker, a magnified hand, or arm, or eye, achieved exellence and efficiency in the part, to a degree impossible to reach except by such specialization; but he lost his grip on life as a whole. This sacrifice was one of the chronic miscarriages of civilization: so universal that it has become 'second nature' to urban man. The blessing of a varied, fully humanized life, released from occupational constraints, was monopolized by the ruling classes. The nobles recognized this; and in more than one culture reserved the title 'true men' for themselves.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“Even today, only a small part of the total energies of the community go into education and expression: we sacrifice far more to the arts of destruction and extermination than to the arts of creation. But it is through the performance of creative acts, in art, in thought, in personal relationships, that the city can be identified as something more than a purely functional organization of factories and warehouses, barracks, courts, prisons, and control centers. The towers and domes of the historic city are reminders of that still unfulfilled promise.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“There is a bitter lament from Egypt's first great popular uprising that reveals the indignation of the upper classes, because the lower orders had broken into their precincts, and not merely turned their wives into prostitutes, but, what seemed equally bad, captured knowledge that had been withheld from them. "The writings of the august enclosure [the temple] are read....The place of secrets...is [now] laid bare....Magic is exposed."
(Admonitions of Ipu-wer: 2300-2050 B.C.?)”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“If anything proves that the city was primarily a control center, long before it became a center of communication, the persistent restrictions exercised over the extension and communication of knowledge would support this interpretation. As in the United States and Soviet Russia today, the great business of the citadel was to 'keep the official secrets.' These secrets created a gap between the rulers and the ruled that almost turned them into different biological species; and it was not until the achievements of civilization themselves were called into question, by popular revolt, that any part of these secrets was shared.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“The development of symbolic methods of storage immensely increased the capacity of the city as a container: it not merely held together a larger body of people and institutions than any other kind of community, but it maintained and transmitted a larger portion of their lives than individual human memories could transmit by word of mouth. This condensation and storage, for the purpose of enlarging the boundaries of the community in time and space, is one of the singular functions performed by the city; and the degree to which it is performed partly establishes the rank and value of the city; for other municipal functions, however essential, are mainly accessory and preparatory. The city, as Emerson well observed, "lives by remembering.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“In the 'Odyssey,' Homer enumerates the strangers that even a simple community would "call from abroad"- the "master of some craft, a prophet, a healer of disease, a builder or else a wondrous bard." In contrast to the original peasants and chiefs these are the new inhabitants of the city. Where they were lacking, the country town remained sunk in a somnolent provincialism.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“The very growth of the city depended on bringing in food, raw materials, skills, and men from other communities either by conquest or trade. In doing this, the city multiplied the opportunities for psychological shock and stimulus.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“The ability to transmit in symbolic forms and human patterns a representative portion of a culture is the great mark of the city: this is the condition for encouraging the fullest expression of human capacities and potentialities, even in the rural and primitive areas beyond.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“Now, there were large elements of coercion even in the most gentle moments of the Egyptian rule, and there were many joyful expressions of human co-operation and intellectual and emotional enrichment even under the most ruthless of totalitarian monarchs in Mesopotamia. In both cases, many of the higher functions of the city were promoted and enlarged. Neither Egyptian nor Mesopotamian form, then, was pure; for the more co-operative kind of local grouping had features that raised disturbing parallels with insect societies in their tendency to fixation and self-stultification; while in the communities most lamed by neurotic anxieties and irrational aggressive compulsions, there was nevertheless a sufficient cultivation of the more positive aspects of life to create a system of law and order, with reciprocal obligations, and to develop some degree of morality for insiders, even though a growing number of these insiders were slaves, captured in war, or remained the cowed inhabitants of villages compelled under threat of starvation to labor like slaves. So much for the forces that in the early stages of civilization brought the city into existence. We shall soon make a provisional appraisal of the cultural results.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects