Lewis Mumford Quotes

It’s important to embrace new technologies instead of fight them.

Please, join the modern world.

Call me an optimist, but in the past 300 years we have built amazing technologies which - by and large - have advanced humanity.

Progress is unstoppable. It is a drumbeat to which we must all march. Technology helps and good ideas spread – these are two lows of nature. If you don’t let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood! I am utterly convinced of this.

We need to walk into the future, no matter how unnerving, with open eyes if society is to keep pace with technology.

Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.

Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex.

If you do an interview in 1960, something it's bound to change by the year 2000. And if it doesn't, then there's something drastically wrong.

At the present time, when railways, the telegraph, the telephone, to say nothing of other inventions and improvements of importance, have simplified communication between all lands and nations to the last degree, there is scarcely any reason to fear either distance or the estrangement of the several parts of a single whole. Practically distance is almost nonexistent. What to our ancestors appeared simply near at hand now seems to lie immediately before our eyes

We presumably believe that most of the technological progress over the arc of humanity to date has been good. I don't see any argument to go back to 1600.

These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves -- they're good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.

Economic progress means the discovery and application of better ways of doing things to satisfy our wants. The piping of water to a household that previously dragged it from a well, the growing of two blades of grass where one grew before, the development of a power loom that enables one man to weave ten times as much as he could before, the use of steam power and electric power instead of horse or human power - all these things clearly represent economic progress.

Now, with the Internet, you're either five years ahead or you're five years behind, and the music game is catchin' up right now.

Frankly, I like new things. I feel like I made a contribution to building a more interactive world. And I'm proud of that.

We tend to credit those who create an idea, not those who perfect it, forgetting that it is often only in the perfection of an idea that true progress occurs. Putting sixty-four transistors on a chip allowed people to dream of the future. Putting four million transistors on a chip actually gave them the future.

It's not the genius who is 100 years ahead of his time but average man who is 100 years behind it.

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention.

Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.

Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!

Technology is always evolving, and companies.. not just search companies.. can't be afraid to take advantage of change.

We do things much the same way as we did 50, 60 or even 70 years ago. The answers may not be wrong, but we haven't experimented to see whether they are or not.

Our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life was short and brutish. It wasn't because we didn't have good politicians; we had some really good politicians. But then we started inventing - electricity, steam engines, microprocessors, understanding genetics and medicine and things like that. Yes, stability and education are important - I'm not taking anything away from that - but innovation is the real driver of progress.

If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a lot of people getting rained on.

A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.

Everyone now claims to be a moderniser and it's obvious, really. I mean, no one now says 'We need to go backwards... to the days of Lord Salisbury'.