The Conduct of Life Quotes

“Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.”
― Lewis Mumford, The Conduct of Life

“The contents of modern man’s daydreams too closely resemble those of Bloom in Ulysses, filled with the dead tags of newspaper editorials, the undigested vomit of advertising slogans, greasy crumbs of irrelevant information, and the choking dust of purposeless activity. The duty to become part of this chaos, to keep up with it, to accept it internally, is the bitter duty of modern man”
― Lewis Mumford, The Conduct of Life

“Apart from these pathological results, our mechanized culture has produced a pervasive sense of frustration. No one can possibly know more than a fragment of all that might be known, see more than a passing glimpse of all that might be seen, do more than a few random, fitful acts, of all that might, with the energies we now command, be done: there is a constant disproportion between our powers and our satisfactions. The typical role of the personality today is an insignificant one: non-commanding, unpurposeful. The walls of the outer shell of our life have thickened, and the creature within has diminished in size in order to accommodate himself to this inimical overgrowth.”
― Lewis Mumford, The Conduct of Life

“The great city, with its drone of unceasing mechanical activities, is no longer man writ large: at best, to adapt himself to his environment, man has reduced himself to a minor mechanism: the machine writ small. The autonomous activities of the personality, choice, selection, self-regulation, self-direction, purposiveness, all the attributes of freedom and creativeness, have become progressively more constrained, as external pressures become more pervasive and overbearing.”
― Lewis Mumford, The Conduct of Life