The neurochemistry of the brain is astonishingly busy, the circuitry of a machine more wonderful than any devised by humans. But there is no evidence that its functioning is due to anything more than the 1014 neural connections that build an elegant architecture of consciousness.
—Carl Sagan in Cosmos
Architecture is the art of how to waste space.
—Philip Johnson
If I were to spit upon the revered black stone in Mecca during the height of the annual pilgrimage, I would be slain on the spot by enraged pilgrims for daring to profane the sacred symbol of Islam. An Israeli soldier's bullet in the back would be my deserved fate for scrawling graffiti upon the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. . . . Life would not be pleasant for me if I took a hammer to the Pietàs in the Vatican, for we humans hold our creations dear, and we deal harshly with those who fail to share our reverence for old stone walls, meteorites, marble statues, icons, and architecture. . . . Yet each and every day, humans enter the most sacred and reverential cathedrals of the natural world — the redwood forests of northern California or the rain forests of Amazonia — and each and every day we profanely rape these great mysteries with chain saws and bulldozers.
—Paul Watson
It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an Airport' appear.
—Douglas Adams
I installed a skylight in my apartment... the people who live above me are furious!
—Steven Wright
Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.
—Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.
—Frank Lloyd Wright
If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.
—Arne Jacobsen
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
—Elvis Costello