Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
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."
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on humanity's relationship with time and how technology has changed our perception of it.
Lewis Mumford's quote explores the notion that time, as we understand it, is a construct created by humans, largely influenced by technological advancements like the clock. He argues that rather than experiencing time organically, we have become measured and constrained by our inventions, evolving into beings that serve and monitor time rather than engage with it meaningfully.
Themes
TimeTechnologyHumanityClockPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about how technology affects our lives, this quote can highlight the impact of clocks on our perception of time.
More from Lewis Mumford
All quotes →Neither 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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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
Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.
Lewis MumfordRead
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