Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis MumfordRead
Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.
Interpretation
War results in profound suffering and destruction, leaving a lasting impact on humanity.
This quote by Lewis Mumford encapsulates the grim realities of war, highlighting how it brings about a range of horrors such as suffering, physical and emotional injuries, destruction of infrastructure, terror among populations, starvation due to disrupted resources, and ultimately death. It serves as a powerful reminder of the devastating consequences that warfare inflicts on society and individuals alike.
In practice
During a lecture on the impacts of conflict, I quoted Lewis Mumford to illustrate the harsh realities of war.
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Neither democracy nor effective representation is possible until each participant in the group...devotes a measurable part of his life to furthering its existence.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Man is a marvelous curiosity...he thinks he is the Creator's pet...he even believes the Creator loves him; has passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him and thinks he listens. Isn't it a quaint idea.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.
He that comes to Christ cannot, it is true, always get on as fast as he would. Poor coming soul, thou art like the man that would ride full gallop whose horse will hardly trot. Now the desire of his mind is not to be judged of by the slow pace of the dull jade he rides on, but by the hitching and kicking and spurring as he sits on his back. Thy flesh is like this dull jade, it will not gallop after Christ, it will be backward though thy soul and heaven lie at stake.
Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.
A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.
I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence.
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