Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Humans often overlook the cruelty involved in food production while condemning hunters for their actions.
This quote by Lewis Mumford highlights the irony in how society perceives cruelty in different forms of animal slaughter. It points out that while some people condemn hunters for their brutal methods, they conveniently ignore the systemic violence and fear experienced by animals in slaughterhouses, suggesting a disconnect in humane values depending on the context of animal death.
Themes
CrueltyButcherHunterSlaughterAnimal Rights
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about ethical eating, one can use this quote to illustrate the hidden cruelties in food production.
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.
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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
Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.
Lewis MumfordRead
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