Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis MumfordRead
The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the transformative role of a city in shaping culture and creativity from various forms of energy and matter.
Lewis Mumford emphasizes the idea that cities serve a crucial purpose in harnessing different forms of power and energy not only for practical use but also to cultivate a vibrant cultural environment. By transforming lifeless materials and biological processes into expressions of art and social creativity, cities facilitate the flourishing of human imagination and relationships, enriching society.
Themes
CityPowerCultureArtCreativityTransformation
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about urban development, a leader might quote this to inspire investment in cultural projects.
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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