Frank Lloyd Wright: The human race built most nobly when limitations w...

Science can give us only the tools in the box, these mechanical miracles that it has already given us. But of what use to us are miraculous tools until we have mastered the humane, cultural use of them? We do not want to live in a world where the machine has mastered the man; we want to live in a world where man has mastered the machine.

Frank Lloyd Wright

giving men science

Dining is and always was a great artistic opportunity.

Frank Lloyd Wright

artistic dining opportunity

No stream rises higher than its source

Frank Lloyd Wright

architect streams source

All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.

Frank Lloyd Wright

bad-ass badass architecture

I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city.

Frank Lloyd Wright

cities doubt world

Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.

Frank Lloyd Wright

men life mean

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet.

Frank Lloyd Wright

falling-water poet architecture

Our forefathers were not only brave. I believe they were right. I believe that what they meant was that every man born had equal right to grow from scratch by way of his own power unhindered to the highest expression of himself possible to him.

Frank Lloyd Wright

expression men believe

Doctors bury their mistakes, Architects cover them with ivy

Frank Lloyd Wright

doctors ivy mistake

The room within is the great fact about the building.

Frank Lloyd Wright

building facts rooms

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.

Frank Lloyd Wright

artist cities looks

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?

Frank Lloyd Wright

lasts beauty long

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

design office simple

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

names men ideas

For America today organic architecture interprets (will eventually build) this local embodiment of human freedom. This natural architecture seeks spaciousness, grace and openness; lightness and strength so completely balanced and logical that it is a new integrity.

Frank Lloyd Wright

grace integrity america

I prefer honest arrogance to hypocritical modesty.

Frank Lloyd Wright

modesty honest arrogance

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. The size of the project means little in art, beyond the money matter. It is the quality of the character that really counts.

Frank Lloyd Wright

character mean art

If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.

Frank Lloyd Wright

buttons technology men

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

Frank Lloyd Wright

ornaments realization matter

"I don't know whether you are a saint or a fool" said my lawyer. I replied "Is there a difference?"

Frank Lloyd Wright

fool saint differences

The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest.