Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis MumfordRead
Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes that the birth of a child represents a basic instinct for survival amidst societal challenges.
Lewis Mumford's quote suggests that each new baby symbolizes a fundamental human instinct to survive and procreate, particularly in response to existential threats. In contexts where individuals feel powerless to enact change through political means, the act of bringing new life into the world becomes a profound statement of resistance and hope for the future. It highlights the biological drive to continue humanity even in dire circumstances.
Themes
SurvivalBirthProcreationPolitical ProtestHope
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of family and future generations during a community event.
More from Lewis Mumford
All quotes βNeither 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
Similar quotes
The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.
Mahmoud DarwishRead
With the eventual acceptance of Darwin's theory we reach a modern understanding of nature, one which has since then changed in detail rather than in fundamentals. Only those who prefer religious faith to beliefs based on reasoning and evidence can still maintain that the human species is the special darling of the entire universe, or that other animals were created to provide us with food, or that we have divine authority over them, and divine permission to kill them.
Peter SingerRead
Nothing ever happens in the world that does not happen first inside human hearts.
Fulton J. SheenRead
The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the 19th century in "On Liberty." The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual's own good.
Milton FriedmanRead
Zeus most glorious and most great, Thundercloud, throned in the heavens! Let not the sun go down and the darkness come, until I cast down headlong the citadel of Priam in flames, and burn his gates with blazing fire, and tear to rags the shirt upon Hectors breast! May many of his men fall about him prone in the dust and bite the earth!
HomerRead
It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
Gilbert K. ChestertonRead