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
A Christian man is on his guard with respect to those who philosophize according to the elements of this world, not according to God, by Whom the world itself was made; for he is warned by the precept of the apostle and faithfully hears what has been said, 'Beware that no one deceive you through philosophy and vain deceit, according to the elements of the world'
Saint AugustineRead
I am a spark from the Infinite. _x000D_ I am not flesh and bones. _x000D_ I am light.
Paramahansa YoganandaRead
Economic theorists, like French chefs in regard to food, have developed stylized models whose ingredients are limited by some unwritten rules. Just as traditional French cooking does not use seaweed or raw fish, so neoclassical models do not make assumptions derived from psychology, anthropology, or sociology. I disagree with any rules that limit the nature of the ingredients in economic models.
George AkerlofRead
The rights of neutrality will only be respected when they are defended by an adequate power. A nation, despicable by its weakness, forfeits even the privilege of being neutral.
Alexander HamiltonRead
It is terrible to die of thirst in the ocean. Do you have to salt your truth so heavily that it does not even-quench thirst any more?
Friedrich NietzscheRead
Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that's how we've got to live.
Haruki MurakamiRead