The two most potent post-war orthodoxies--socialist politics and modernist art--have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.

The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.

Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.

Sanctions make a substantial contribution to power based on privation, and they have never hurt a single despot in the whole history of their use.

Science proposes something and then does everything it can to disprove it. Religion is not like that. It proposes something and does everything it can to keep it from being disproved.

The relation of the soul to the body is like that of a house to its bricks. The soul is a principle of organisation, which governs the flesh and endows it with meaning. It is no more separable from the flesh than is the house from its bricks, even if the soul may survive the gradual replacement of every bodily part.

There is a deep human need for beauty and if you ignore that need in architecture your buildings will not last