Frank Gehry Quotes

Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?

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."

I am now The Establishment. There's nothing I can do about it.

Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.

When people are used to you doing something, they want you to stay in that lane.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

Some, I verily believe, delight to be slave-men; it is a joy to them, and they would not change their condition; not only miserable village wretches, but men in good position, well-to-do sycophants.

It’s not the mainstream. It’s just the status quo.

Action requires co-operation, but in general if you set your face against custom, people will set their faces against you. They cannot tell whether you are right or wrong, but they know that you are guilty of a pragmatical assumption of superiority over them which they do not like.

We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the 'social-worker'-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.

Status quo just means that everyone's doing it. It doesn't mean that this was divinely ordained, and of course this is the right decision.

Being quiet is comfortable. Keeping things the way they've been is comfortable. And all comfort has done is maintain the status quo.

When you accept the way things are, there's really no other way to operate than the way you've been conditioned to. You live in America: you're free to vote, you go vote, and you continue to see the problems of being a nationalistic society. You don't really know what to do because you're conditioned to feel that's just the way things are.

It's no longer possible to find something which will shock other people, because everything has already been done.

Folks will always, always, always go back to the comfortable status quo, with its silent voices and lack of conflict, if you give them the chance.

The label of tasteful or tasteless is so often used to silence people and to maintain the status quo. It's used to shame people for not following the commonly accepted routine, for not aligning themselves with the status quo.

Faith is being idealistic, because we have made an idol out of the status quo.

Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.

We tolerate without rebuke the vices with which we have grown familiar.

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

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.

No one should let themselves get used to anything.

We mistrust anything that too strongly challenges our ideal of mediocrity.

A lot of people just capitulate and say, "Well, that's just the way things are." I think that can be deadly for creative people.