"Early unsuccessess shouldn't bother anybody because it happens to absolutely everybody."
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Quote collection
Philip Johnson quotes (page 3 of 4)
61 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I get between nine and ten hours of sleep. Go to bed at 8:30 and get up at 6:00 or 6:30 if I oversleep."
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"I hate the celebrity architect thing. I just do my work. The press comes up with this stuff and it sticks. I hate the word starchitect. Stuff like that comes from mean-spirited, untalented journalists. It's demeaning."
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"So now the floodgates are open to the delight of pure form, whatever its origin. Anything goes."
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"From the very fact the universe is on the whole orderly, in a manner comprehensible to our intellect, is evidence that we and it were fashioned by a common intelligence."
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"Purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful."
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"Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing."
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"There's no such thing as old age. I'm no different now than I was 50 years ago. I'm just having more fun."
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"I call myself a traditionalist, although I have fought against tradition all my life."
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"The first complete sentence out of my mouth was probably that line about consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds."
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"Ninety-eight percent are boxes, which tells me that a lot of people are in denial. We live and work in boxes. People don't even notice that. Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable. People say, "This is the world the way it is, and don't bother me." Then when somebody does something different, real architecture, the push-back is amazing. People resist it. At first it's new and scary."
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"I wish someone would ask me to design a cathedral."
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"Some of the opera houses in Italy had to be burnt down because people could neither see nor hear. They gave up seeing years ago, but they did enjoy the music."
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"[Evolution] doesn't mean God-guided, gradual creation. It means unguided, purposeless change. The Darwinian theory doesn't say that God created slowly. It says that naturalistic evolution is the creator, and so God had nothing to do with it."
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"In our universal experience unintelligent material processes do not create life"
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"In our greatest universities, naturalism - the doctrine that nature is all there is - is the virtually unquestioned assumption that underlies not only natural science but intellectual work of all kinds."
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"The best thing to do with water is to use a lot of it."
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"Processionalism is primary - how you get from one place to another, the relationships and effects of spaces as you move about in them. That's worked out awfully well in the State Theater. I'm a 'straight-in' man myself; I'm too nervous, I like to know where I am. I also like to know where I'm going."
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"I wouldn't build a building if it wasn't of interest to me as a potential work of art. Why should I?"
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"American megalomania is largely responsible for the growth of the Skyscraper School."
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