"It's not so important what you [high school students] work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take."

"There's no switch inside you [high school students] that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age."

"Your teachers are always telling you [high school students] to behave like adults. I wonder if they'd like it if you did. You may be loud and disorganized, but you're very docile compared to adults.... Imagine the reaction of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told they had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and only one person could go at a time."

"Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world."

"The other thing that's different about the real world [compared to high school] is that it's much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together."

"If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies."

"Metaphysical problems about "mind" versus "matter" arise only from epistemological confusions."

"Humor could not flourish in a wholly serious and rational atmosphere."

"From what little was known about the subject, insincerity itself was regarded as another form of psychosis but one which was exceedingly rare."

"Medical opinions differed as to the cause of this "humor" disease."

"There is nothing like a naturalistic orientation to dispel all these morbid thoughts of "sin" and "free will" and "moral responsibility.""

"If it is really true that you cannot resist them, then you are not sinning of your own free will and hence (at least according to me) not sinning at all."

"I have free will, but not of my own choice. I have never freely chosen to have free will. I have to have free will, whether I like it or not!"

"Why should I worry about dying? It's not going to happen in my lifetime!"

"Of course the falsity of the fact that you believe it is red implies that you don't believe it is red. But this does not mean that you believe it is not red!"

"I believe that either Jupiter has life or it doesn't. But I neither believe that it does, nor do I believe that it doesn't."

"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?"

"If the abstraction is truly made well above the animal nature in man—his gregarious nature—it will keep the ancient rituals of his higher nature as long as possible. Human abstractions if true usually become ritual."

"Success was misunderstood as essential to progress. Really success was worse than failure."

"Different were the prophets of the human soul."

"But soon this saving virtue appeared to me in our disgraceful dilemma: Realization that any true cultural significance our American free society could know lay in the proper use of the machine as a tool and used only as a tool."

"Everywhere these inventions of science by ignorant misuse of a new technique were wiping out the artist."

"To survive, our American art was cheating itself of life."

"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."