"A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind."
"Virtue is not a chemical product...it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key."
6 likes
Source: Values for Survival. Essay by Lewis Mumford, 1946.
About the author
Same author
More quotes by Lewis Mumford
"Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past."
"What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself"
"The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live."
"Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals."
"Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity."