Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis MumfordRead
One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.
Interpretation
Intelligence should be used with caution, as relying only on it can lead to danger.
This quote by Lewis Mumford emphasizes the importance of not solely relying on intelligence without considering the potential risks and consequences that may arise from such trust. It suggests that while intelligence is a valuable asset, it must be complemented with caution, awareness, and critical thinking to navigate complex situations effectively.
In practice
During a seminar on decision-making, this quote can be used to highlight the importance of integrating wisdom with intelligence.
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.
There is no pleasure without a tincture of bitterness.
The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.
If you are pitched into misery, remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left.
The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best. They might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn't follow you home and park your car.
What we know matters but who we are matters more.
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.
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