Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis MumfordRead
Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.
Interpretation
War results in profound suffering and destruction, leaving a lasting impact on humanity.
This quote by Lewis Mumford encapsulates the grim realities of war, highlighting how it brings about a range of horrors such as suffering, physical and emotional injuries, destruction of infrastructure, terror among populations, starvation due to disrupted resources, and ultimately death. It serves as a powerful reminder of the devastating consequences that warfare inflicts on society and individuals alike.
In practice
During a lecture on the impacts of conflict, I quoted Lewis Mumford to illustrate the harsh realities of war.
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Neither democracy nor effective representation is possible until each participant in the group...devotes a measurable part of his life to furthering its existence.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction: if it could be told, How much would novels gain by the exchange! How differently the world would men behold!
I meditate for the last time on this mountain that is bare, though others all around are white with snow. Like the bare peak of the koan, this one is not different from myself. I know this mountain because I am this mountain, I can feel it breathing at this moment, as its grass tops stray against the snows. If the snow leopard should leap from the rock above and manifest itself before me - S-A-A-O! - then in that moment of pure fright, out of my wits, I might truly perceive it, and be free.
The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure. Thoughts are not etched on the inside of skulls, to be perused by an invader. The mind is a complex and many-layered thing.
Everything we do really is just a little marker on the long road to death. And sometimes thatβs overwhelmingly depressing to me, and sometimes it makes me feel kinship and forgiveness. Weβve all got the same ending to the story. The way we make that story more elaborate, I got to respect.
A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.
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