Henceforward, I shout to the heavens, I shall deliver no more lectures on behalf of good causes: I am the good cause that denies the need for such lectures. Avaunt, importuning world! Back to my cell.
LEWIS MUMFORDHumor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
More Lewis Mumford Quotes
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New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
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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.
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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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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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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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Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
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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…
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Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.
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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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To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.
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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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The self holds both a hell and a heaven.
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Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
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Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.
LEWIS MUMFORD