“New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.”

What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.

The building is a national tragedy – a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.

In the end, these unavoidable conflicts provide architecture’s essential and productive tensions; the tragedy is that so little of it rises above the level imposed by compromise, and that this is the only work most of us see and know.

Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance

The gamble of triumph or tragedy at this scale – and ultimately it is a gamble – demands an extraordinary payoff. The trade center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world.

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

Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness,

Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.

California … is the place that sets the trends and establishes the values for the rest of the country; like a slow ooze, California culture spreads eastward across the land.

Tossed into the Secaucus graveyard are about 25 centuries of classical culture and the standards of style, elegance and grandeur that it gave to the dreams and constructions of Western man.

It is the rare architect who does not hope in his heart to design a great building and for whom the quest is not a quiet, consuming passion.

Some people wait constructively; they read or knit. I have watched some truly appalling pieces of needlework take form. Others – I am one of them – abandon all thought and purpose to an uneasy vegetative states.

The skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous; the tall building is the landmark of our age.Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect.

Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.

The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.

In New York, the impact of these concentrated superskyscrapers on street scale and sunlight, on the city’s aniquated support systems, circulation

I don’t have any delusions of grandeur or delusions of failure. In terms of my work, I’ve got a pretty cold honest eye.

The scale and grandeur of the Russian effort mark it as the greatest military achievement in all history.

There is a certain grandeur.

To answer, to live in a way which is compatible with the grandeur and mystery of living.

The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.

Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time.

Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear-filling grandeur. Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder.

It is our honest response to the grandeur and mystery of reality our confrontation with that which transcends the given.