“The style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste.”

Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.

Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.

It is more important than ever that we receive that extra dimension of dignity or delight and the elevated sense of self that the art of building can provide through the nature of the places where we live and work.

Every generation tailors history to its taste.

Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,

A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.

Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.

Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.

All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.

The perennial architectural debate has always been, and will continue to be, about art versus use, visions versus pragmatism, aesthetics versus social responsibility.

An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn’t awful.

Every creative act draws on the past whether it pretends to or not. It draws on what it knows. There’s no such thing, really, as a creative act in a vacuum.

That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.

The art of decoration requires the most sophisticated and self-indulgent skills. Its aim has always been to sate the senses as gloriously as possible… ornament is not only a source of sensuous pleasure

the search for the ultimate skyscraper goes on. … At worst, overbuilding will make urban life unbearable. At best, we will go out in a blaze of style.

No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.

The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.

Boxing is changing and training methods are slowly being dragged into the 21st century.

Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.

If you can’t laugh at yourself, you may be missing the colossal joke of the century.

Totalitarianism is feudalism in the twelfth century sense of the word.

The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths, and picked the old fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden.

The proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem underscores how stable mathematics is through the centuries – how mathematics is one of humanity’s long continuous conversations with itself.

The life story of the five main characters and the secondary characters around them allows Jonathan Franzen to present the full impetus and extent of the world picture of the West at the end of the 20th century.