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
Similar quotes
Everything which relates to God is infinite. We must therefore, while we keep our hearts humble, keep our aims high. Our highest services are indeed but finite, imperfect. But as God is unlimited in goodness, He should have our unlimited love.
Hannah MoreRead
It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.
Henrik IbsenRead
Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male freedom. The unknown stranger is a wandering pagan god. The altar, as in pre-history, is anywhere you kneel.
Camille PagliaRead
There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.
Eugene O'NeillRead
Human kind cannot bear much reality.
T. S. EliotRead
We would rather see those to whom we do good, than those who do good to us.
Francois De La RochefoucauldRead