"Again: I found repeatedly confirmed that the inferior mind not only learns by comparison, but loosely confers its superlatives, while the superior mind which learns by analysis refrains from superlatives."

"Resemblances are mistaken for influences."

"Great art has always, at first, been controversial. Now that our means of communication have multiplied, how much more so today?"

"Genuine expressions as essence of the great art itself cannot be taught or imitated. Nor can they in any way be forced."

"... the huge business of education is not on speaking terms with culture and such culture as we now have is not on speaking terms with reality."

"No! is always easier to say than Yes."

"As melody is in music ornament is in architecture revelation of the poetic-principle, with character and significance."

"Intellectual is not necessarily intelligent either."

"Poetic is prophetic insight."

"The petty bias of personal taste can no longer hide either excrescence or spiritual poverty in the name of style."

"Man either learns to usefor humanity his new facilities or he perishes by them."

"The spiritual dignity of this new humane life for mankind is the Spirit of Man himself sacrosanct."

"Only Art and Religion can bring this new vision as reality to a nation."

"Spirit is man's new power if he is to be truly mighty in his civilization."

"Science is inventive but creative never."

"Architecture is intrinsic to Time, Place and Man."

"By being so far educated beyond his capacity is he unable to learn within himself from nature? Divorced as he is from her, who and what can now be his? Does the so-called free man of democracy merely exploit his sovereignity?"

"There is nothing so timid as a million dollars."

"Nature's own inexhaustible fertility is manifest exuberance, and never less than the elemental poetry of all her structure."

"Exuberance to me early meant ecstacy of love, the poetic principle of life."

"No jealousy is comparable to professional jealousy."

"Even though a disgrace, machine-made, ornament stayed and still thrives."

"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."

"Reform only means more conformity. It is form first that is needed."

"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?"

"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."

"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."