Stanislaw Jerzy Lec Quotes

I don't think all buildings have to be iconic, but the history of the world has shown us that cultures build iconic buildings for their major public buildings.

There is a use for almost everything.

The Elgin Marbles were supposed to be on the Parthenon. For many works of art, a museum is an artificial setting - a zoo, not a natural habitat.

All through history, a nation or a civilization's enduring glory is articulated by its mega constructions - the pyramids, the lofty cathedrals of the Christian world.

I have a wonderful make-up crew. They're the same people restoring the Statue of Liberty.

It is not architectural achievement that makes the structures of earlier times seem to us so full of significance but the circumstance that antique temples, Roman basilicas, and even the cathedrals of the Middle Ages are not the works of single personalities but creations of entire epochs.

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

It may not be art, but it is history.

The statues are no big issue. They are only objects made of mud or stone.

You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.

Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

A monument should be singular. Fate and happenstance have endowed this democracy with a constellation of remarkably varied and aesthetically impressive representations of our national adventure, and this endowment should be enlarged with care.

Architecture is a special kind of career that showcases the accumulations of culture, time, and history.

I like the word monument, because the word monument is a Latin word.

I believe history and tradition is something solid and something we can rest on. I am not crazy about putting new spices in chocolate.

Why not? That's a good reason for almost anything - a bit used perhaps, but still quite serviceable.

If you keep a thing seven years, you are sure to find a use for it.

A lot of people believe that you don't need to know the history and that creates newness. I disagree: we should always be informed and then destroy it.

To shut yourself from history is to shut yourself off from say music or painting or the theatre, literature for the rest of your life. It would be to cheat yourself of the pleasures of life.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

I realized the importance of archiving. So I save key pieces from my collections, as well as any red-carpet things that become iconic. I always ask for that stuff back. I'm like, "It's going in my archives."

I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I'm for that. Where the government is necessary, I'm for that. I'm deeply suspicious of somebody who says, 'I'm in favor of privatization,' or, 'I'm deeply in favor of public ownership.' I'm in favor of whatever works in the particular case.

I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.

You're building a tool, not a piece of art. Don't be blinded by the vision.

...never let a passion for the perfect take precedence over pragmatism.