Top 223 Quotes & Sayings by Frank Lloyd Wright - Page 4

Prison house for the soul

Greed in human nature may now come near to enslaving all humanity by means of the Machine - so fast and far has progress gone with it. This will be evident to anyone who stops to study the modern mechanistic Moloch and takes time to view it in its larger aspects.

Why should architecture or objects of art in the machine age, just because they are made by machines, have to resemble machinery?

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 wouldnt mind seeing opera die. Ever since I was a boy, I regarded opera as a ponderous anachronism, almost the equivalent of smoking.

I think Miss Monroe as architecture is extremely good architecture, and she's a very natural actress, and a very good one.

The sense of space within the reality of any building is a new concept wherever architecture is concerned. But it is essential ancient principle just the same and is not only necessary now but implied by the ideal of democracy itself.

Consider everything in the nature of a hanging fixture a weakness, and naked radiators an abomination.

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

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

Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture.

Taste is a matter of ignorance. If you know what you are tasting, you don't have to taste.

The cultural influences in our country are like the floo floo bird. I am referring to the peculiar and especial bird who always flew backward. To keep the wind out of its eyes? No. Just because it didn't give a darn where it was going, but just had to see where it had been.

We should have a system of economics that is structure that is organic tools. We do not have it. We are all hanging by our eyebrows from skyhooks economically, just as we are architecturally.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears - as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.

On this simple unit-system [of building blocks] ruled on the low table-top all these forms were combined by the child into imaginative patter. Design was recreation! ...The virtue of all this lay in the awakening of the childmind to rhythmic structure in Nature - giving the child a sense of innate cause-and-effect otherwise far beyond child-comprehension.

The insolence of authority is endeavoring to substitute money for ideas.

We boast the highest standard of living when it's only the biggest.

Boston: Clear out eight hundred thousand people and preserve it as a museum piece. New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.

Architecture isman'sgreat sense of himself embodied in a world of his own making. It may rise as high in quality only as its source because great art isgreat life.

I could list of dozens things my fiancee does that annoys me and I'm sure he could list off hundreds of things about me but the fact is that even through all that we love each other. We love each other in spite of our flaws and despite all the things we do that should make us hate each other we still continue to fall deeper in love. Sometimes we want to hate each other but for two people who are truly in love it simply isn't possible. Not even a little but, not even at all.

The baby boomers are out there, they've had a lot of good years of earnings, they've inherited wealth. They are buying trophy homes and will be for years. We are one of those places people dream of. They come here to buy a piece of that dream.

It looked a lot worse than it was. Al is going to be released. He has vision and it's going to be day-by-day prognosis now. But it's much, much better than we initially anticipated.

What I like best about San Francisco is San Francisco.

A man with a machine may murder or enslave millions, whereas it used to take at least thousands to murder millions. And the man behind the machine has nothing on his conscience.

I don't build a house without predicting the end of the present social order.

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.

All I learned from Eliel Saarinen was how to make out an expense account

So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal.

Now, of course, architecture is a blind spot of our life in America today. How many millions of students go to the university to be educated? They come away conditioned, not enlightened, and they know nothing of architecture, although they have a department somewhere around -- probably in the basement.

From time to time the continent shifts, and everything that isn't fastened down slides into Southern California.

If the paintings are too large, cut them in half!

Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title. - Virginia Woolf, from Jacob's Room Television is chewing gum for the eyes.

Is there anything more anti-American than McCarthyism?

The dynamic ideal we call democracy, gradually growing up in the human heart for two-thousand five hundred years, at least, has now every opportunity to found the natural democratic state in these United States of America by way of natural economic order and a natural, or organic, architecture.

Wherever human life is concerned, the unnatural stricture of excessive verticality cannot stand against more natural horizontality.

Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly.

I'm against war. Always have been, always will be. And everything connected with it, is anathema to me. I have never considered it necessary.

Self fulfilling prophecies do exist in real life

Money shows [man] new ways to cheat life. Power becomes exterior instead of interior. In these circumstances architecture becomes too difficult, building too easy.

Man is a phase of nature, and only as he is related to nature does he matter, does he have any account whatever above the dust.

New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.

The two most important tools an architect has are the eraser in the drawing room and the sledge hammer on the construction site.