Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques the assumption that everyone should have unrestricted access to all areas of a city by car, highlighting the destructive impact this can have on urban environments.
Lewis Mumford's quote reflects on the consequences of unfettered access to cities by private vehicles. It argues that the notion of 'rights' in terms of transportation can lead to significant urban decay and environmental degradation, suggesting that what is often seen as an individual privilege can collectively harm the community and its infrastructure. The right to drive anywhere, unchecked, poses a threat to the essence and functionality of the urban landscape.
Themes
Urban PlanningAccessVehiclesDestructionCityRights
In practice
Example use cases
In a public speech addressing urban development, one might use this quote to emphasize the need for sustainable transportation solutions.
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 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
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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