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

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

Country Men People Safety
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

Government Real Thinking
In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Army Peace War
Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Funny Humor Inspirational
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 MUMFORD

Cell Heaven Needs
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
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
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
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 self holds both a hell and a heaven.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Heaven Hell Self
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Flower Funny Witty
Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Growth Self Transformation
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
To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Art Machines Opportunity
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
Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.
LEWIS MUMFORD

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

Birth Growth Immortality
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

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

Cities Country People Perfect

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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