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A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility.
Lewis Mumford
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Inequality in work and leisure leads to the decline of society as a whole.

This quote emphasizes the detrimental effects of societal inequality, where one class is afforded leisure while another bears the weight of labor. Mumford argues that such a disparity not only harms those who work excessively but also impoverishes those who enjoy leisure, ultimately resulting in a loss of spiritual and cultural vibrancy in society.

Themes

InequalityWorkLeisureSocietySpirituality

In practice

Example use cases

This quote could be used in a lecture about social justice and economic disparities.

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Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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