Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
LEWIS MUMFORDNothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
More Lewis Mumford Quotes
-
-
New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
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 -
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.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
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 -
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 -
Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
LEWIS MUMFORD -
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 -
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 -
The last step in parental love involves the release of the beloved; the willing cutting of the cord that would otherwise keep the child in a state of emotional dependence.
LEWIS MUMFORD