Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

—Lewis Mumford

humor USA traffic flowers

About Lewis Mumford

Portrait of Lewis Mumford

Lewis Mumford (October 19, 1895 – January 26, 1990) was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer. He made significant contributions to social philosophy, American literary and cultural history,...

More quotations from Lewis Mumford

A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.

—Lewis Mumford

opposition help

To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.

—Lewis Mumford

A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure and to another all the burdens of work condemns both classes to spiritual sterility.

—Lewis Mumford

society work inequality class leisure sterility

Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are oﬀered, without respect to their human consequences.

—Lewis Mumford

More quotations tagged with “flowers”

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

—Claude Monet

art flowers painting

No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.

—Samuel Johnson

spring flowers autumn

I hate flowers—I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.

—Georgia O'Keeffe

art flowers painting

Arnold Bennett visited Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw in his apartment and, knowing his host's love of flowers, was surprised that there was not a single vase of flowers to be seen. He remarked on their absence to Shaw: "But I thought you were so fond of flowers."
"I am," said Shaw, "and I'm very fond of children, too, but I don't chop their heads off and stand them in pots about the house.

—The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes

children death flowers decapitation

Flowers… put up no resistance to attack, suffer evil rather than inflicting it, imitate carnal love, multiply without fighting, and die without complaining.… They have realized the dream of Buddha: to desire nothing, to tolerate everything, to be absorbed in oneself to the depths of the unconscious will.

—J. Rambosson

evil will fighting desire flowers tolerance

History

19 Mar 2014 Added