Lewis Mumford Quotes

If we ought not to fear mortal truth, still less should we dread scientific truth. In the first place it can not conflict with ethics? But if science is feared, it is above all because it can give no happiness? Man, then, can not be happy through science but today he can much less be happy without it.

There's no question that as science, knowledge and technology advance, that we will attempt to do more significant things. And there's no question that we will always have to temper those things with ethics.

I saw science as being in harmony with humanity.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Did science promise happiness? I do not believe it. It promised truth, and the question is to know if we will ever make happiness with truth.

There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.

True knowledge is that which establishes harmony and synthesis between ience on the one hand and spirituality and ethics on the other.

Science and Peace will triumph over Ignorance and War...

Science has radically changed the conditions of human life on earth. It has expanded our knowledge and our power, but not our capacity to use them with wisdom.

There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other.

All the conditions of happiness are realized in the life of the man of science.

The 21st century is the century of knowledge. Knowledge, science and education will have the power and strength to embrace the entire universe.

The most important thing about the gentleman was that he was an idealist. ... He was bred up to a code of self-restraint which taught resistance to pragmatic temptation. He was definitely a man of sentiment, who refused to put matters on a basis of materialism and self-aggrandizement.

I have no notions of a perfect society, I don’t know what that means. I know we can do much better than what we’ve got, I’m no utopian, I’m not a humanist that would like to see everybody living in warmth and harmony: I know that if we don’t live that way, we’ll kill each other and destroy the Earth.

To use Newton's words, our efforts up till this moment have but turned over a pebble or shell here and there on the beach, with only a forlorn hope that under one of them was the gem we were seeking. Now we have the sieve, the minds, the hands, the time, and, particularly, the dedication to find those gems-no matter in which favorite hiding place the children of distant worlds have placed them.

Faith and reason are the shoes on your feet. You can travel further with both than you can with just one.

I'm a guy who's all about peace, love, and happiness. I'm a bit of a hippie.

Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding

Only those who live on the labor of the ignorant are the enemies of science. Real love and real religion are in no danger from science. The more we know the safer all good things are.

Ultimately there is no happiness in a world in which things are not as good as they can be.

What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.

The next great task of science is to create a religion for humanity.

I think no matter what, science can provide a force for good, fundamentally. Over time, like all things, it's open to abuse.

History repeats, but science reverberates.

Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.