Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis MumfordRead
Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights how modern life's noise and interruptions invade our inner sanctum, suggesting that even our personal spaces for reflection are compromised.
In this quote, Lewis Mumford emphasizes the loss of sanctity in our inner lives due to the external distractions of contemporary society. He suggests that the only remaining space free from these disruptions is a private toilet, symbolizing how pervasive and intrusive daily life has become, making it difficult for individuals to find moments of true solitude and introspection.
Themes
Inner LifeDistractionSolitudeReflectionSociety
In practice
Example use cases
During a talk on mental health, you can use this quote to emphasize the need for personal space.
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
Similar quotes
There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.
Eric HofferRead
A good style must, first of all, be clear. It must not be mean or above the dignity of the subject. It must be appropriate.
AristotleRead
Kira, the highest thing in man is not his god. It's that in him which knows the reverence due a god. And you, Kira, are my highest reverence.
Ayn RandRead
Again I ask whence it happened that the fall of Adam involved, without remedy, in eternal death so many nations, together with their infant children, except because it so seemed good to God? A decree horrible, I confess, and yet true.
John CalvinRead
I still believe that capitalism is too harsh and I believe that, even within that, there is a lot of satisfaction and beauty if you happen to be one of the lucky ones, although that doesn't eradicate the reality of the suffering. It's all true at once, kind of humming and sublime.
George SaundersRead
The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror. (βThe Medusaβ)
Thomas LigottiRead