Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes

94 Sourced Quotes

Machinery, materials and men — yes — these are the stuff by means of which the so-called American architect will get his architecture.... Only by the strength of his spirit's grasp upon all three — machinery, materials and men — will the architect be able so to build that his work may be worthy the great name architecture.

Frank Lloyd Wright
The insolence of authority is endeavoring to substitute money for ideas.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Beautiful buildings are more than scientific. They are true organisms, spiritually conceived; works of art, using the best technology by inspiration rather than the idiosyncrasies of mere taste or any averaging by the committee mind.

Frank Lloyd Wright
The cultural influences in our country are like the floo floo bird. I am referring to the peculiar and especial bird who always flew backward. To keep the wind out of its eyes? No. Just because it didn't give a darn where it was going, but just had to see where it had been.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Mathematics in co-ordinated Form is architecture.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Any good architect is by nature a physicist as a matter of fact, but as a matter of reality, as things are, he must be a philosopher and a physician.

Frank Lloyd Wright
By playing down to the idea of the common man, dogmatic political authority exploits him... So the ideal of innate aristocracy of which hour forefathers dreamed is betrayed for votes in the name of democracy.

Frank Lloyd Wright
The only thing wrong with architecture [is] the architects.

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

Frank Lloyd Wright
The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest.

Frank Lloyd Wright
How many understand that Nature is the essential character of whatever is. It's something you'll find by looking not at, but in, always in. It's always inside the thing, and it makes the outside. And some day, when you get sufficiently proficient in understanding the use of the term, you can tell by the outside pretty much from what's inside.

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Now, of course, architecture is a blind spot of our life in America today. How many millions of students go to the university to be educated? They come away conditioned, not enlightened, and they know nothing of architecture, although they have a department somewhere around -- probably in the basement.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Toward the end of the last century, many physicists felt that the mathematical description of physics was getting ever more complicated. Instead, the mathematics involved has become ever more abstract, rather than more complicated. The mind of God appears to be abstract but not complicated. He also appears to like group theory.

Frank Lloyd Wright
When we come to understand architecture as the essential nature of all harmonious structure we will see that it is the architecture of music that inspired Bach and Beethoven, the architecture of painting that is inspiring Picasso as it inspired Velasquez, that it is the architecture of life itself that is the inspiration of the great poets and philosophers.

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

Frank Lloyd Wright
New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.

Frank Lloyd Wright
I have seemed to belittle the nature of our time and the great achievements of science, but I have intended to do neither because I believe human nature still sound, and recognize that science has done a grand job as well; but well I know that Science cannot save us.

Frank Lloyd Wright
I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Clear out 800,000 people and preserve it as a museum piece.

Frank Lloyd Wright
The-Shadow-of-the-Wall–Primitive Instincts Still Alive
Part 2

Frank Lloyd Wright
As we live and as we are, Simplicity - with a capital "S" - is difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.

Frank Lloyd Wright
We should have a system of economics that is structure that is organic tools. We do not have it. We are all hanging by our eyebrows from skyhooks economically, just as we are architecturally.

Frank Lloyd Wright
New York is the biggest mouth in the world. It appears to be prime example of the herd instinct, leading the universal urban conspiracy to beguile man from his birthright (the good ground), to hang him by his eyebrows from skyhooks above hard pavement, to crucify him, sell him, or be sold by him.

Frank Lloyd Wright
The necessities were going by default to save the luxuries until I hardly knew which were necessities and which luxuries.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Give me the luxuries in life and I will willingly do without the necessities.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.

Frank Lloyd Wright