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

The truth is more important than the facts.

A box is more a coffin for the human spirit than an inspiration.

There is no true understanding of any art without some knowledge of its philosophy. Only then does its meaning come clear.

An expert is a man who has stopped thinking. Why should he think? He is an expert.

An architect’s most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board and a wrecking ball at the site.

The best thing to do is go as far out as you can get… what you regard as ‘too far’-and when others follow, as they will, move on.

Building becomes architecture only when the mind of man consciously takes it and tries with all his resources to make it beautiful, to put concordance, sympathy with nature, and all that into it. Then you have architecture.

Youth is not an age thing. It’s a quality. Once you’ve had it, you never lose it.

Art for art’s sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Each material has its own message.

Space is the breath of art.

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.

We have no longer an outside and an inside as two separate things. Now the outside may come inside and the inside may and does go outside. They are of each other. Form and function thus become one in design and execution if the nature of materials and method and purpose are all in unison.

Television is chewing gum for the eyes.

Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.

Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.

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.