Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes

It's easier to make changes with a pencil than a wrecking bar.

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

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

To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

Greed in human nature may now come near to enslaving all humanity by means of the Machine - so fast and far has progress gone with it. This will be evident to anyone who stops to study the modern mechanistic Moloch and takes time to view it in its larger aspects.

I'll bridge these hills with graceful arches

I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.

No stream rises higher than its source

Each material has its own message.

Less is only more where more is no good.

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.

If you tilt the whole country sideways, Los Angeles is the place where everything loose will fall.

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.

The tall modern office building is the machine pure and simple...the engine, the motor and the battleship the works of the century.

Architecture is the frame of human existence. We must dedicate this existence more to beauty. For if poetic principle has deserted us, how long are we going to last?

A man with a machine may murder or enslave millions, whereas it used to take at least thousands to murder millions. And the man behind the machine has nothing on his conscience.

Freedom is from within.

No house should ever be on any hill... It should be of the hill.

I believe totally in a Capitalist System, I only wish that someone would try it.

Prison house for the soul

The truth is more important than the facts.

I find that government can be a kind of gangsterism and is in Russia. And is likely to be in America if we don't take care of ourselves pretty carefully.

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

There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.

The dynamic ideal we call democracy, gradually growing up in the human heart for two-thousand five hundred years, at least, has now every opportunity to found the natural democratic state in these United States of America by way of natural economic order and a natural, or organic, architecture.

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.

We create our buildings and then they create us. Likewise, we construct our circle of friends and our communities and then they construct us.

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.

I'm against war. Always have been, always will be. And everything connected with it, is anathema to me. I have never considered it necessary.

Love of an idea is the love of God.

I do not believe in adding enrichment merely for the sake of enrichment. Unless it adds clearness to the enunciation of the theme, it is undesirable, for it is very little understood.

I don't build a house without predicting the end of the present social order.

Respect the masterpiece. It is true reverence to man. There is no quality so great, none so much needed now.

True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park. At its best it is an emphasis of structure, a realization in graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented

The sense of space within the reality of any building is a new concept wherever architecture is concerned. But it is essential ancient principle just the same and is not only necessary now but implied by the ideal of democracy itself.

All the more I study Nature do I revere God, because Nature is all the body of God we will ever know.

On this simple unit-system [of building blocks] ruled on the low table-top all these forms were combined by the child into imaginative patter. Design was recreation! ...The virtue of all this lay in the awakening of the childmind to rhythmic structure in Nature - giving the child a sense of innate cause-and-effect otherwise far beyond child-comprehension.

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.

Boston: Clear out eight hundred thousand people and preserve it as a museum piece. New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.

An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site.

A building is not just a place to be but a way to be.

TV is chewing gum for the eyes.

What I like best about San Francisco is San Francisco.

Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances.

If you foolishly ignore beauty, then you will soon find yourself without it.

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

A vital difference between the professional man and a man of business is that money making to the professional man should, by virtue of his assumption, be incidental; to the businessman it is primary. Money has its limitations; while it may buy quantity, there is something beyond it and that is quality.

'Think in simples' as my old master used to say - meaning to reduce the whole to its parts in simplest terms, getting back to first principles.