Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
LEWIS MUMFORDIf we never met again in our lives I should feel that somehow the whole adventure of existence was justified by my having met you.
More Lewis Mumford Quotes
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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.
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New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
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If we never met again in our lives I should feel that somehow the whole adventure of existence was justified by my having met you.
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In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.
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To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.
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For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old.
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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.
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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.
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Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.
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Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
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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.
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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.
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The self holds both a hell and a heaven.
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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.
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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