Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis MumfordRead
The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes that unreason and rigid thinking are the main obstacles to achieving peace.
In this quote, Lewis Mumford highlights how the inability to think critically, challenged by rigid ideologies and prejudices, leads to conflict and disrupts peace. He suggests that embracing new ideas and being open to alternative perspectives is essential for fostering harmony and understanding in society.
Themes
PeaceUnreasonIdeologyUnderstandingPrejudiceIdeas
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about conflict resolution, this quote could be used to emphasize the need for open-mindedness.
More from Lewis Mumford
All quotes →Neither democracy nor effective representation is possible until each participant in the group...devotes a measurable part of his life to furthering its existence.
Lewis MumfordRead
Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created."We effectively became "time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers" with the invention of the clock."
Lewis MumfordRead
By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.
Lewis MumfordRead
The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city.
Lewis MumfordRead
The very people who shudder over the cruelty of the hunter are apt to forget that slaughter, in the grimmest sense of the word, is a process they entrust daily to the butcher; and that unlike the game of the forests, even the dumbest creatures of the slaughterhouse know what is in store for them.
Lewis MumfordRead
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