Great Throughts Treasury

"Early in my career I was a very arrogant young man... I was so sure of my ground and my star that I had to choose between an honest arrogance and a hypercritical humility... and I deliberately choose an honest arrogance, and I've never been sorry."

"Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world."

"Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change."

"Every great architect is -- necessarily -- a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age."

"Don't eat it. It will kill you before your time. Avoid it. [on the subject of pepper]"

"Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy."

"Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union."

"Every idea that is a true idea has a form, and is capable of many forms. The variety of forms of which it is capable determines the value of the idea. So by way of ideas, and your mastery of them in relation to what you are doing, will come your value as an architect to your society and future. That's where you go to school. You can't get it in a university, you can't get it here, you can't get it anywhere except as you love it, love the feeling of it, desire and pursue it. And it doesn't come when you are very young, I think. I believe it comes faster with each experience, and the next is very simple, or more simple, until it becomes quite natural to you to become master of the idea you would express."

"Freedom is from within"

"Freedom lies within."

"Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will."

"Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes"

"He exposes all the function on the top and puts the form below. It's as if you were to wear your entrails on top of your head. [about un-named architect]"

"Here I am, Philip, am I indoors or am I out? Do I take my hat off or keep it on?"

"How many understand that Nature is the essential character of whatever is. It's something you'll find by looking not at, but in, always in. It's always inside the thing, and it makes the outside. And some day, when you get sufficiently proficient in understanding the use of the term, you can tell by the outside pretty much from what's inside… But everything that's ever going to be of use to you in architecture or in life or anywhere you go or whatever you do is going to be Nature, in some of its immensely varied forms. So varied that there's no end to the variety imaginable."

"Human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful it is entirely their own fault. It is what they do to themselves that makes them ugly. The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life."

"God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has been said often by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And, I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see. If we wish to know the truth concerning anything, we'll find it in the nature of that thing."

"How is he made? Oftentimes bitter, sometimes sweet, seldom even wide-awake, architectural criticism of the modern wholly lacks inspiration or any qualification because it lacks the appreciation that is love: the flame essential to profound understanding. Only as criticism is the fruit of such experience will it ever be able truly to appraise anything. Else the spirit of true criteria is lacking. That spirit is love and love alone can understand. So art criticism is usually sour and superficial today because it would seem to know all about everything but understand nothing. Usually the public prints afford no more than a kind of irresponsible journalese wholly dependent upon some form of comparison, commercialization or pseudo-personal opinion made public. Critics may have minds of their own, but what chance have they to use them when experience in creating the art they write about is rarely theirs? So whatever they may happen to learn, and you learn from them, is very likely to put over on both of you as it was put over on them. Truth is seldom in the critic; and either good or bad, what comes from him is seldom his. Current criticism is something to take always on suspicion, if taken at all."

"He was too good for the job. [why he didn't vote for a particular presidential candidate]"

"I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you."

"Humanity to me is not a mob. A mob is a degeneration of humanity. A mob is humanity going the wrong way."

"I believe totally in a Capitalist System, I only wish that someone would try it."

"I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city."

"I feel coming on a strange disease -- humility"

"I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion."

"I hate intellectuals. They are from the top down. I am from the bottom up."

"I never design a building before I've seen the site and met the people who will be using it."

"I have been black and blue in some spot, somewhere, almost all my life from too-intimate contacts with my own furniture."

"I had no choice, Olgivanna. I was under oath. , immediately after a court appearance when he was asked his occupation and answered saying he was the world’s greatest architect."

"I think Ms. [Marilyn] Monroe's architecture is extremely good architecture"

"I wouldn't mind seeing opera die. Ever since I was a boy, I regarded opera as a ponderous anachronism, almost the equivalent of smoking."

"If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger."

"If it sells, it's art."

"If the paintings are too large, cut them in half! [concerning low ceilings in the Guggenheim Museum]"

"If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life."

"If capitalism is fair then unionism must be. If men have a right to capitalize their ideas and the resources of their country, then that implies the right of men to capitalize their labor."

"If you tilt the whole country sideways, Los Angeles is the place where everything loose will fall."

"If you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life."

"If you're going to have centralization, why not have it!"

"If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization ... go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city. There beneath you is the monster, stretching acre upon acre into the far distance. High overhead hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath, reddened with light from myriad eyes endlessly, everywhere blinking. Thousands of acres of cellular tissue, the city’s flesh outspreads layer upon layer, enmeshed by an intricate network of veins and arteries radiating into the gloom, and in them, with muffled, persistent roar, circulating as the blood circulates in your veins, is the almost ceaseless beat of the activity to whose necessities it all conforms. The poisonous waste is drawn from the system of this gigantic creature by infinitely ramifying, thread-like ducts, gathering at their sensitive terminals matter destructive of its life, hurrying it to millions of small intestines to be collected in turn by larger, flowing to the great sewers, on to the drainage canal, and finally to the ocean."

"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters."

"I'm no teacher. Never wanted to teach and don't believe in teaching an art. Science yes, business of course… but an art cannot be taught. You can only inculcate it, you can be an exemplar, you can create an atmosphere in which it can grow. Well I suppose I, being an exemplar, could be called a teacher, in spite of myself. So go ahead, call me a teacher."

"I'll bridge these hills with graceful arches."

"It [New York City] is a great monument to the power of money and greed... a race for rent"

"In 1943, many Germans went to the Wright household and held musicals."

"Imitation is always insult--not flattery."

"It is where life is fundamental and free that men develop the vision needed to reveal the human soul in the blossoms it puts forth. ... In a great workshop like Chicago this creative power germinates, even though the brutality and selfish preoccupation of the place drive it elsewhere for bread. Men of this type have loved Chicago, have worked for her, and believed in her. The hardest thing they have to bear is her shame. These men could live and work here when to live and work in New York would stifle their genius and fill their purse.... New York still believes that art should be imported; brought over in ships; and is a quite contented market place. So while New York has reproduced much and produced nothing, Chicago’s achievements in architecture have gained world-wide recognition as a distinctively American architecture."

"Less is more only when more is too much."

"It is a terrific thing to get a building built that has the qualities of greatness in it."

"Liberty may be granted but freedom cannot be conferred. Freedom is from within. Notwithstanding all the abuses to which freedom is now subject--marking man down as a commercial item and cutting him off from his birthright by senseless excess and the demoralization of the profit-system--yet man may still be in love with life and find life less and less abundant for this very reason. Truth is of freedom, always safe and affirmative, therefore conservative. Truth proclaims rejection of dated minor traditions, doomed by the great Tradition of The Law of Change is truth's great eternal. Freedom is this great becoming."