Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis MumfordRead
Above all we need, particularly as children, the reassuring presence of a visible community, an intimate group that enfolds us with understanding and love, and that becomes an object of our spontaneous loyalty, as a criterion and point of reference for the rest of the human race.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of a supportive community in a child's development.
Lewis Mumford highlights that children particularly require a visible and reassuring community that envelops them with love and understanding. This close-knit group not only fosters a sense of belonging but also serves as a reference point for how they engage with the wider world, establishing foundational loyalty and social values that guide their interactions with others.
Themes
CommunityChildrenSupportLoveLoyaltyUnderstandingRelationship
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of community programs for children.
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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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."
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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.
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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