Philip Johnson Quotations

The practice of architecture is the most delightful of all pursuits. Also, next to agriculture, it is the most necessary to man. One must eat, one must have shelter. Next to religious worship itself, it is the spiritual handmaiden of our deepest convictions.

Faith? Haven't any. I'm not a nihilist or a relativist. I don't believe in anything but change. I'm a Heraclitean - you can't step in the same river twice.

You're going to change the world? Well, go ahead and try. You'll give it up at a certain point and change yourself instead.

The people with money to build today are corporations - they are our popes and Medicis. The sense of pride is why they build.

To me, the drive for monumentality is as inbred as the desire for food and sex, regardless of how we denigrate it. Monuments differ in different periods. Each age has its own.

Architecture is art, nothing else.

The automobile is the greatest catastrophe in the entire history of City architecture.

Don't build a glass house if you're worried about saving money on heating.

Anybody can build a building, putting some doors into it, but how many times have you been in a building that moves you to tears the way Beethoven's 'Eighth' does?

Doing a house is so much harder than doing a skyscraper.