Van Wyck Brooks on Lewis Mumford

“In a time that was more and more oppressed with a sense of the vanity of the human will, he was constantly aware of our still untapped resources; his key-word was always "renewal"; and, with all his feeling for the past, he cared less for what has been than for what may be. Lewis was one of the few men who have not ideas but an idea, and he was to spend his life working this out.”

“He had caught in England the last rays of the morning glow of William Morris's poetic socialism, and he was to remain a vitalist in a world of mechanists, behaviourists, determinists, Marxians and so on.”