"Both Art and Religion are on the way. Both must go hand in hand as ever before. Both together illuminating our sciences will constitute the soul of this civilization."

"Votes are counted. Yes—but vision can neither be counted nor discounted."

"The soul of any civilization on earth has ever been and still is Art and Religion, but neither has ever been found in commerce, in government of the police."

"So the poet in the engineer and the engineer in the poet and both in the architect may be seen here working together, lifelong."

"Everyone engaged in creative work is subject to persecution by the odious comparison. Odious comparisons dog the footsteps of all creation wherever the poetic principle is involved because the inferior mind learns only by comparisons; comparisons, usually equivocal, made by selfish interests each for the other. But the superior mind learns by analyses: the study of Nature."

"Philosophy is to the mind of the architect as eyesight is to his steps. The term "genius" when applied to him simply means a man who understands what others only know about."

"About Le Corbusier: Well, now that he's finished one building, he'll go write four books about it."

"Human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful it is entirely their own fault. It is what they do to themselves that makes them ugly. The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life."

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

"God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature and it has been said often by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And, I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see. If we wish to know the truth concerning anything, we'll find it in the nature of that thing."

"Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change."

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

"Here I am, Philip, am I indoors or am I out? Do I take my hat off or keep it on?"

"Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived."

"Nature is all the body of God we mortals will ever see."

"I believe in God, only I spell it "Nature"."

"The scientist has marched in and taken the place of the poet. But one day somebody will find the solution to the problems of the world and remember, it will be a poet, not a scientist."

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

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

"Clear out 800,000 people and preserve it as a museum piece."

"I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city."

"The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines."

"Every great architect is — necessarily — a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age."

"A free America, democratic in the sense that our forefathers intended it to be, means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call 'democracy' is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it."

"I'm no teacher. Never wanted to teach and don't believe in teaching an art. Science yes, business of course..but an art cannot be taught. You can only inculcate it, you can be an exemplar, you can create an atmosphere in which it can grow. Well I suppose I, being an exemplar, could be called a teacher, in spite of myself. So go ahead, call me a teacher."

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

"No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other."

"It is where life is fundamental and free that men develop the vision needed to reveal the human soul in the blossoms it puts forth. ... In a great workshop like Chicago this creative power germinates, even though the brutality and selfish preoccupation of the place drive it elsewhere for bread. Men of this type have loved Chicago, have worked for her, and believed in her. The hardest thing they have to bear is her shame. These men could live and work here when to live and work in New York would stifle their genius and fill their purse.... New York still believes that art should be imported; brought over in ships; and is a quite contented market place. So while New York has reproduced much and produced nothing, Chicago's achievements in architecture have gained world-wide recognition as a distinctively American architecture."

"Pictures deface walls oftener than they decorate them."

"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. There beneath you is the monster, stretching acre upon acre into the far distance. High over head hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath, reddened with light from myriad eyes endlessly, everywhere blinking. Thousands of acres of cellular tissue, the city's flesh outspreads layer upon layer, enmeshed by an intricate network of veins and arteries radiating into the gloom, and in them, with muffled, persistent roar, circulating as the blood circulates in your veins, is the almost ceaseless beat of the activity to whose necessities it all conforms. The poisonous waste is drawn from the system of this gigantic creature by infinitely ramifying, thread-like ducts, gathering at their sensitive terminals matter destructive of its life, hurrying it to millions of small intestines to be collected in turn by larger, flowing to the great sewers, on to the drainage canal, and finally to the ocean."

"As for religion true to the teaching of the great redeemer who said "The Kingdom of God is within you—that religion is yet to come: the concept true not only for the new reality of building but for the faith we call democracy. Nevertheless and notwithstanding, I have wanted to build this faith—life-long."

"For this, if for no other reason, degeneration of creative ability in America has had ample support, and what nobility our society might still have is in danger of being submerged in overwhelming tides of rising conformity."

"As a people we remain comparative strangers to our own life in our own time in our own home: native culture waiting in vain on our door step."

"Creation is not only rare but always hazardous. Always was."

"Is false abstraction always the consequence of spiritual degeneration?"

"Almost all our so-called "modern" is not yet new. It is merely novel by imitation or indirection; or pretense by imported picture."

"In every new expression of a fundamental Idea there will always be the substitutes, the imitations, dangling from it, as the soiled fringe from a good garment."

"Thus the plausible expedient has become gospel and continues to be generally foisted upon those who seek better things; the conformities proclaimed by authority, however specious, temporarily mistaken for Godhead."

"I then believed critics were by nature no less confused than confusing."

"See the last chapter in Genesis where Cain, the murderer of his brother, went forth with his sons to found the city. The City is still murdering his brother."

"Between the radical and the conformist lies all the difference between a lithe tendon and a length of gas-pipe."

"Servility increases—already a seemingly unguarded danger to democracy not only in art and architecture and religion but in all phases of life."

"This drift toward quantity instead of quality is largely distortion. Conformity is always too convenient? Quality means individuality, is therefore difficult. But unless we go deeper now, quantity at expense to quality will be our national tragedy—the rise of mediocrity into high places."

"Might not the spirit of creative art, desperately needed by man, lie in the proper use of the radical new technologies of our times, and so arise?"

"What means more to the life of the individual in our own place in Time than this study of the nature of human nature, the search to discover pertinent traces of hidden impulses of life, to form continually new abstractions uplifting the life he lives?"