Rem Koolhaas Quotes

I have inherited a belief in community, the promise that a gathering of the spirit can both create and change culture. In the desert, change is nurtured even in stone by wind, by water, through time.

As any custom is disused, the words that expressed it must perish with it; as any opinion grows popular, it will innovate speech in the same proportion as it alters practice.

Culture is a product of law. And laws create norms for society. This is why anyone who wants to change the culture of a country must try to change the norms of the country.

The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.

One of the interesting things about Los Angeles is that it's still supplying the whole of the world with its dreams through movies and songs and TV - often of an all-American family at the same time as the real Los Angeles is peopled by souls from Vietnam, Guatemala, and Korea who look nothing like the images being beamed out. I think all that is going to have to change and illusion is going to have to catch up with reality in that regard.

You can’t mandate [cultural change], can’t engineer it. What you can do is create the conditions for transformation. You can provide incentives. You can define the marketplace realities and goals. But then you have to trust. In fact, in the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.

I understand that and I have had very candid discussions with Saudi leaders in the past. I respect their culture and their heritage and their traditions, but I think that they now, as they move forward, will have to start examining these traditions and these practices to see whether or not change is appropriate.

Political change and academic change and intellectual change are obviously crucial, but they don't necessarily change society. They can change a particular class and give everybody in that class great arguments, but that doesn't necessarily translate into the body of the culture.

The correct rate of speed in innovating changes in long-standing social customs has not yet been determined by even the most expert of the experts. Personally I am beginning to think there is more danger in lagging than in speeding up cultural change to keep pace with mechanical change.

We must note carefully what distinction there is between a healthy and a diseased love of change; for as it was in healthy love of change that the Gothic architecture rose, it was partly in consequence of diseased love of change that it was destroyed.

Just out of curiosity, I wonder what makes music or culture or taste go in certain directions. Who knows what the forces are behind it.

A culture that holds people back should and can be changed.

It was no longer esteemed infamous for a Roman to survive his honor and independence.

Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.

People who want to wage cultural wars ought to keep in mind that cultural views often don't move at all for a very long time, but when they move they can move very fast.

A civilization is complicated, in the first place, because it is dynamic; that is, it is constantly changing in the passage of time, until it has perished.

You can't move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it.

No religion is suddenly rejected by any people; it is rather gradually outgrown. None sees a religion die; dead religions are like dead languages and obsolete customs: the decay is long and - like the glacier march - is perceptible only to the careful watcher by comparisons extending over long periods.

First of all, break-dancing has been done for years, though not all of it put together the way it is now. But, actually, the distinctions have been blurring since the 1950s.

In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.

One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn’t continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion.

There is no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level.

When politics is too slow, change has to come from culture.

There is little history in the study of nature, and there is little nature in the study of history. I want to show how we can remedy that cultural lag by developing a new perspective on the historian's enterprise, one that will make us Darwinians at last.

A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by "progress.