Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis MumfordRead
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.
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.
More from Lewis Mumford
All quotes βNeither 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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