On Architecture...

• "I never design a building before I've seen the site and met the people who will be using it."
• "My building will last at least 300 years"
• "So flexible and simple as to be almost unbelievable."
• "If the paintings are too large, cut them in half!" - When questioned about the low ceilings in the Guggenheim Museum.
• "The sense of space within the reality of any building is a new concept wherever architecture is concerned. But it is essential ancient principle just the same and is not only necessary now but implied by the ideal of democracy itself."
• "Wherever human life is concerned, the unnatural stricture of excessive verticality cannot stand against more natural horizontality." -- On skyscrapers.
• "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."

On Government...

• "Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture."
• "Architectural features of true democratic ground-freedom would rise naturally from topography, which means that buildings would all take on the nature and character of the ground on which in endless variety they would stand and be component part."
• "He was too good for the job." -- When asked why he didn't vote for a particular presidential candidate.
• "The dynamic ideal we call democracy, gradually growing up in the human heart for two-thousand five hundred years, at least, has now every opportunity to found the natural democratic state in these United States of America by way of natural economic order and a natural, or organic, architecture."
• "Again in America we erect temples but this time not so much to the mystery of great terrestrial or cosmic forces as to the interior or spirit-power of manhood as released by American democracy and its sciences."

On Nature...

• "I'll bridge these hills with graceful arches"
• "The good building is not one that hurts the landscape, but one which makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before the building was built."
• "No house should ever be on any hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it, so hill and house could live together each the happier for the other."
• "The outside of any building may now come inside and the inside go outside, each seems as part of the other. Continuity, plasticity, and all the new simplicity the imply have at last come home."

On Life...

• "...The next one." -- When asked which was his favorite project.
• "It is a terrific thing to get a building built that has the qualities of greatness in it."
• "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."
• "Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves."