Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis MumfordRead
Each one of us, as long as life stirs is us, may play a part in extricating ourselves from the power system by asserting our primacy as people in quiet acts of mental or physical withdrawal-in gestures of non-conformity, in abstentions, restrictions, inhibitions, which will liberate us from the domination of the pentagon of power.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of individual action and non-conformity in resisting oppressive systems of power.
In this quote, Lewis Mumford suggests that each person has the ability to challenge and withdraw from overpowering systems by embracing their individuality. Through acts of non-conformity and self-restraint, individuals can liberate themselves from societal control and assert their personal agency, highlighting the significance of personal choice and action in the face of authority.
Themes
IndividualityNon-ConformityPowerResistanceLiberation
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on civil rights, one could use this quote to illustrate the power of individual actions in challenging systemic injustices.
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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