Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis MumfordRead
Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes that the birth of a child represents a basic instinct for survival amidst societal challenges.
Lewis Mumford's quote suggests that each new baby symbolizes a fundamental human instinct to survive and procreate, particularly in response to existential threats. In contexts where individuals feel powerless to enact change through political means, the act of bringing new life into the world becomes a profound statement of resistance and hope for the future. It highlights the biological drive to continue humanity even in dire circumstances.
Themes
SurvivalBirthProcreationPolitical ProtestHope
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of family and future generations during a community event.
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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