Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Quotes

You can only judge anything that happened in the times, in the times that that happened.

It is natural to try to understand one's own time and to seek to analyse the forces that move it.

It is a hopeless endeavor to make the form and content of earlier architectural epochs usable for our time; in this, even the strongest artistic talent must fail. We see repeatedly how the outstanding builders fail to achieve an effect because their work does not serve the will of the age.

I'm also fascinated by the interplay between personal history and the larger forces that form the context for our lives.

Customary though it may be to write about that institutionalized pastime as though it existed apart from the general environment, my story does not lend itself to such treatment.

Just as we acquaint ourselves with materials, and just as we must understand functions, we must become familiar with the psychological and spiritual factors of the day. No cultural activity is possible otherwise, for we are dependent on the spirit of our time.

Most social acts have to be understood in their setting and lose meaning if isolated... No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function.

You can't just read the Koran to understand Muslim life. You have to look at history, at personalities, at economics, and so on.

I had the good fortune to be able to take a course with Margaret Mead. I had a fabulous art course, where it was explained to me that nothing exists in a vacuum, that everything is a result of the period in which it's done - the economics, the sociology, the politics, all sewn together. That was a very important lesson.

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

We all, to some degree, absorb the mythologies around us, our vision refracted by the prisms of our particular time and place.

I'm interested in the balance between big currents in history - the economies, the ideologies, social structures, and so on - and the decisions that people have to make. At the heart of all these great decisions to go to war, there are human beings who have to say, 'Yes, let's do it,' or 'No, we won't do it.'

The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.

It is only possible to speak in the language and in the spirit of one's time.

First of all, I think the situation today is different. We're in a different place than we were in '93, '94.

If we become too scared to confront the chief problems of our time, there is no hope of ever solving them.

Technology gives us the facilities that lessen the barriers of time and distance - the telegraph and cable, the telephone, radio, and the rest.

My art will reflect not necessarily conscious politics but the unanalysed politics of my life.

What gets in our way is history and culture and religion and economic conditions. It is part of the hypnosis of our social conditioning.

The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism.

As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?

Actual human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum.

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

Genes cannot tell us how to catalogue or comprehend human diversity. Environments can, cultures can, geographies can, histories can.

... consensus on social values is determined less and less by demographic factors.