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.
Moreover, I consider that Carthage should be destroyed.
You know, that might be the answer - to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail.
The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads. Laughter, praise, honors, money, and the love of beautiful girls will be your only reward.
The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the sound is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived.
Although the life of a person is in a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.
Every now and then, a person must do something simply because he wants to, because it seems to him worth doing. And that does not make it worthless or a waste of time.
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