Quotes by Lewis Mumford

The most deadly criticism one could make of modern civilisation is that apart from its man-made crises and catastrophes, it is not humanly interesting...

In the end, such a civilisation can produce only a mass man: incapable of choice, incapable of spontaneous, self-directed activities: at best patient, docile, disciplined to monotonous work to an almost pathetic degree, but increasingly irresponsible as his choices become fewer and fewer: finally, a creature governed mainly by his conditioned reflexes - the ideal type desired, if never quite achieved, by the advertising agency and the sales organisations of modern business, or by the propaganda office and the planning bureaus of totalitarian and quasi-totalitarian government. The handsomest encomium for such creatures is: 'They do not make trouble'. Their highest virtue is: 'They do not stick their necks out'. Ulitmately such a society produces only two groups of men: the conditioners and the conditioned; the active and the passive barbarians.