Lewis Mumford Quotes
Only when love takes the lead will the earth, and life on earth, be safe again. And not until then.
Mumford, Lewis. The Conduct of Life. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951, p. 292.
This famous ad showed a young girl removing petals from a daisy which then transitions into a nuclear explosion. It is often considered to be the most effective political TV commercial ever produced. One of the reasons it was so effective is that although the Democrats only ran the ad once, it was repeatedly played on television news and analysis shows and is a much studied and discussed approach. The ad was produced by Tony Schwartz.
Proenza was giving an explanation of why he had “blown the whistle” on the Department of Commerce over the QuickScat weather satellite. QuickScat, was the satellite that the Hurricane Center used to give early warnings about hurricanes and other tropical storms. However in 2007 it was still in service although it was only designed for a shorter period than it had already been functioning. Proenza and other scientists at NOAA reported that the satellite could fail at any time and leave the nation without an equivalent predictive tool. There had been a government plan to replace the satellite with a new one, but the cost was $400 million, but the Bush Administration had cut taxes massively and had gone from the Clinton budget surplus to the largest deficit then in American history. The administration told all senior officials that they should not tell Congress or the public that they needed any more money. When Proenza went public because he thought that people could easily die for lack of predictive capability of hurricanes, the George W, Bush administration suspended him for speaking out and not being loyal to the President and his administration. His loyalty was to the lives and safety of the American people and not to any politicians.
Lewis Mumford 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. Mumford made signal contributions to social philosophy, American literary and cultural history and the history of technology. Mumford was influenced by the work of Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes and worked closely with his associate the British sociologist Victor Branford.
