Lewis Mumford

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

"Let us confess it: the human situation is always desperate."

"If, as many anthropologists still hold, the making and using of tools as one of the chief sources of primitive mans intellectual development, is it not time that we asked ourselves what will happen to man if he departs as completely as he now threatens to do from his primal polytechnic occupations? Since they can no longer be pursued at a profit, perhaps they will have to be restored as modes of sport and recreation, even more as helpful — increasingly essential — forms of personal service and mutual aid."

"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."

"Here was my city, immense, overpowering, flooded with energy and light... The world, at that moment , opened before me, challenging me, beckoning me, demanding something of me that it would take more than a lifetime to give, but raising all my energies by its own vivid promise to a higher pitch."

"The aggregation of the spiritual life from the practical life is a curse that falls impartially upon both sides of our existence. A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility."