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Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
Lewis Mumford
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Lewis Mumford
Age: 94 †
Born: 1895
Born: October 19
Died: 1990
Died: January 26
Architect
Architectural Theoretician
Historian
Historian Of Technology
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Flushing
Long Island
Life
Absurdities
Defending
Absurdity
Humor
Funny
Inspirational
Way
Thinking
Absurdly
More quotes by Lewis Mumford
Neither democracy nor effective representation is possible until each participant in the group...devotes a measurable part of his life to furthering its existence.
Lewis Mumford
The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.
Lewis Mumford
This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid.
Lewis Mumford
The very people who shudder over the cruelty of the hunter are apt to forget that slaughter, in the grimmest sense of the word, is a process they entrust daily to the butcher and that unlike the game of the forests, even the dumbest creatures of the slaughterhouse know what is in store for them.
Lewis Mumford
Deliberately, on every historic occasion, we piously fake events for the benefit of photographers, while the actual event often occurs in a different fashion and we have the effrontery to call these artful dress rehearsals authentic historic documents.
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
In our entrancement with the motorcar, we have forgotten how much more efficient and how much more flexible the footwalker is.
Lewis Mumford
The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.
Lewis Mumford
By putting business before every other manifestation of life, our mechanical and financial civilization has forgotten the chief business of life: namely, growth, reproduction, development. It pays infinite attention to the incubator-and it forgets the egg!
Lewis Mumford
Geneva has the sleepy tidiness of a man who combs his hair while yet in his pyjamas.
Lewis Mumford
When art seems to be empty of meaning, as no doubt some of the abstract painting of our own day actually does seem, what the painting says, indeed what the artist is shrieking at the top of his voice, is that life has become empty of all rational content and coherence, and that, in times like these, is far from a meaningless statement.
Lewis Mumford
Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.
Lewis Mumford
Chaos, if it does not harden into a pattern of disorder, may be more fruitful than a regularity too easily accepted and a success too easily achieved.
Lewis Mumford
The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.
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 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
New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
Lewis Mumford
A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility.
Lewis Mumford
Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
Lewis Mumford
Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.
Lewis Mumford