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Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.

Lewis Mumford

Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Birth Growth Immortality
New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Cities Country People Perfect
To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Art Machines Opportunity
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Flower Funny Witty
The fact that order and creativity are complementary has been basic to man’s cultural development; for he has to internalize order to be able to give external form to his creativity.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Creativity Men Order
In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Army Peace War
The self holds both a hell and a heaven.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Heaven Hell Self
The artist does not illustrate science; … [but] he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does, and expresses by a visual synthesis what the scientist converts into analytical formulae or experimental demonstrations.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Artist Expression Science
Each person is a temporary focus of forces, vitalities, and values that carry back to an immemorial past and that reach forward into an unthinkable future.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Focus Past Provoking Thought
For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Accepting Mean Progress
The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Diversity Ideas Justice
Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training…
LEWIS MUMFORD

Art Life Practice
Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Baby Mom People
Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Architecture Prophecy Tomb
Safety razors make it hard to grow beards in America: America would be a better place if there were a few bearded, savage, terrible old men.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Country Men People Safety
Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Art Decay Reality

Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.

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Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.

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