If we are bound to improve, we need not trouble to improve. The pure doctrine of progress is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive.

The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.

Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has certain advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work.

If a man only likes victory he must always come late for the battle.

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.

A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.

To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence.