Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis MumfordRead
War is both the product of an earlier corruption, and a producer of new corruptions.
Interpretation
What this quote means
War arises from previous moral failures and simultaneously creates further moral decay.
This quote suggests that war is not just a consequence of past societal and ethical failings, but it also perpetuates a cycle of corruption and degeneration in society. Mumford emphasizes that the act of war corrupts human values and can lead to a downward spiral where new forms of corruption emerge as a result of the violence and chaos of war.
Themes
WarCorruptionSocietyMoralityViolence
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about the impacts of global conflicts on ethical standards.
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.
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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.
Lewis MumfordRead
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