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.

There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

Architecture, like dress, is an exercise in good manners, and good manners involve the habit of skillful insincerity - the habit of saying "good morning" to those whose mornings you would rather blight, and of passing the butter to those you would rather starve.

Private property is one of the best institutions which has ever evolved, to protect us from the bullying of others.

The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order, and set an example of orderly living.

There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines - lines that may come to an end, but that achieve no closure

Classical buildings endure because they are loved, admired and accepted, and enjoy an innate adaption to human needs and purposes.