Birds (414 BC)
Context: Epops: You're mistaken: men of sense often learn from their enemies. Prudence is the best safeguard. This principle cannot be learned from a friend, but an enemy extorts it immediately. It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war. And this lesson saves their children, their homes, and their properties.
Chorus [leader]: It appears then that it will be better for us to hear what they have to say first; for one may learn something at times even from one's enemies.
(tr. Anon. 1812 rev. in Ramage 1864, p. 45 http://books.google.com/books?id=AoUCAAAAQAAJ&pg;=PA45)
“Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.”
My Works and Days (1979)
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Lewis Mumford 75
American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology,… 1895–1990Related quotes
“My other car is a bright green city.”
Name of essay.
Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 512 (2015 edition)
“Lovers forget that after marriage and kids, it's no longer a 'relationship”
It's a family.
page 16
The Other Wife (2003)
Narration for Crash! (1971), a short film by Harley Cokeliss
Context: I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape.
We spend a substantial part of our lives in the motor car, and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in the 1970s, the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the 20th century reaches its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age; the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.
“Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of regard.”
Variant: Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.
Source: The Gunslinger