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

Lewis Mumford

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

Cities Country People Perfect
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
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
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
Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Growth Self Transformation
The self holds both a hell and a heaven.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Heaven Hell Self
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
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

Children Cutting Inspiration
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
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
LEWIS MUMFORD

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

Birth Growth Immortality
Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Funny Humor Inspirational
Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Aggravation Life Sacred
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
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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