Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis MumfordRead
War is both the product of an earlier corruption, and a producer of new corruptions.
Interpretation
What this quote means
War arises from previous moral failures and simultaneously creates further moral decay.
This quote suggests that war is not just a consequence of past societal and ethical failings, but it also perpetuates a cycle of corruption and degeneration in society. Mumford emphasizes that the act of war corrupts human values and can lead to a downward spiral where new forms of corruption emerge as a result of the violence and chaos of war.
Themes
WarCorruptionSocietyMoralityViolence
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about the impacts of global conflicts on ethical standards.
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."
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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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