Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis MumfordRead
Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights how modern life's noise and interruptions invade our inner sanctum, suggesting that even our personal spaces for reflection are compromised.
In this quote, Lewis Mumford emphasizes the loss of sanctity in our inner lives due to the external distractions of contemporary society. He suggests that the only remaining space free from these disruptions is a private toilet, symbolizing how pervasive and intrusive daily life has become, making it difficult for individuals to find moments of true solitude and introspection.
Themes
Inner LifeDistractionSolitudeReflectionSociety
In practice
Example use cases
During a talk on mental health, you can use this quote to emphasize the need for personal space.
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
Similar quotes
The war of ideas is a Greek invention. It is one of the most important inventions ever made. Indeed, the possibility of fighting with with words and ideas instead of fighting with swords is the very basis of our civilization, and especially of all its legal and parliamentary institutions.
Karl PopperRead
All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.
Carlos Ruiz ZafonRead
He that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly become corrupt.
Samuel JohnsonRead
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Walt WhitmanRead
What people see on court is another side of me; it's not me.
Kobe BryantRead
The good traveler has the gift of surprise.
W. Somerset MaughamRead