Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Modern inventions have simplified tasks but have also led to a greater sense of boredom experienced by those who have more leisure time.
This quote by Lewis Mumford highlights the paradox of technological progress: while labor-saving devices have made life easier, they have also resulted in increased boredom as people have more free time and less meaningful activity. Mumford suggests that this depth of ennui was previously reserved for the privileged in earlier societies, but now affects a larger segment of the population due to the advancements in technology.
Themes
TechnologyBoredomProgressLeisureSociety
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech on the impact of technology on society.
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
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
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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