“Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.”

One war only breeds another.

An idea is salvation by imagination.

You will find Goodness and Truth everywhere you go. If you have to choose, choose Truth. For that is closest to Earth. Keep close to the Earth, in that lies strength. Simplicity of heart is just as necessary for an architect as for a farmer or a minister if the architect is going to build great buildings.

Youth is a circumstance you can’t do anything about. The trick is to grow up without getting old.

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.

An idea is inevitably a coordination. It is a coming together of something that is separate or disorganized or incomplete. With an idea you begin to feel into the nature of that incompleteness.

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

Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.

The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.

Simplicity and Repose are qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.

The room within is the great fact about the building.

The mission of an architect is to help people understand how to make life more beautiful, the world a better one for living in, and to give reason, rhyme, and meaning to life.

The best friend of earth of man is the tree.

I attend the greatest of all Churches. I put a capital N on Nature, and call it my Church.

Dining is and always was a great artistic opportunity.

Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.

Wherever we look, the work of the chemist has raised the level of our civilization and has increased the productive capacity of the nation.

We must have no carelessness in our dealings with public property or the expenditure of public money. Such a condition is characteristic either of an undeveloped people, or of a decadent civilization. America is neither.

From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.

Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it.

Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they’ve got none to spend. That’s our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

If we assume man has been corrupted by an artificial civilization, what is the natural state? the state of nature from which he has been removed? imagine, wandering up and down the forest without industry, without speech, and without home.

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.