Science & Tech Quote by Lewis Mumford

Lewis Mumford, a chronicler and critic of the machine age, saw the 20th century reveal an unsettling paradox. Modern science and what he called technics — not just tools, but the whole social organization around them — produced marvels that shattered old limits while also missing deeper human possibilities. Air travel, antibiotics, radio, and eventually the splitting of the atom proved that barriers once thought absolute could be crossed. At the same time, mass production, militarization, and the authoritarian coordination of people and machines created what he later dubbed the megamachine, a vast apparatus often indifferent to human needs.

The phrase nothing is impossible carries both exhilaration and warning in his hands. It is not the boosterism of a futurist dazzled by gadgets; it is the sober recognition that imagination, disciplined by method, can overturn the constraints of nature and custom alike. If such power can put footprints on the moon, it can also level cities, surveil populations, and exhaust ecosystems. The very demonstration that the impossible can be made real widens the field of both salvation and catastrophe.

Mumford insists that the shortfall of science and technics lies less in their technical limits than in their moral direction. The inherent possibilities he evokes are human possibilities: to build cities that fit the rhythms of life, to knit communities, to harmonize technology with ecology. Achievements that ignore those ends may be brilliant yet barren. The lesson, then, is not permission to attempt anything simply because it can be done, but a summons to enlarge our standards for what counts as success.

As new frontiers in AI, biotechnology, and climate intervention unfold, the line becomes newly concrete. Nothing is impossible reminds us that resignation is premature and fatalism misplaced. It also binds us to choice. If the impossible can be realized, we must decide which impossibilities are worth making real.