Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis MumfordRead
Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Traditionalists tend to focus negatively on future possibilities while positively recalling past experiences.
In this quote, Lewis Mumford reflects on the mindset of traditionalists, who often view the future with skepticism and concern, believing in a decline based on current trends or changes. However, they romantically idealize the past, seeing it as a time of stability and certainty, which can make it challenging for them to embrace change and innovation.
Themes
TraditionalistsFuturePastPessimismOptimismMindset
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about attitudes towards societal change.
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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