Favorite Quotes

Archive of Older Topics Archive Coffee Pot and Water Cooler
1

I have a short collection of quotes that tend to apply to my role as a construction administrator. I thought I’d share them here, and maybe pick up a few new ones from you all:

"The two most important tools an architect has are the eraser in the drawing room and the sledge hammer on the construction site.
Frank Lloyd Wright

“A good plan executed now is better than the perfect plan next week.”
General George S. Patton

"In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing; the next best thing is the wrong thing; and the worst thing you can do is nothing.
Theodore Roosevelt

The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary. Thomas A. Edison

"We write frankly and fearlessly but then we “modify” before we print.
Mark Twain
Life on the Mississippi

The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If youre not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the shortcuts and economies and commonsense changes that your native intelligence suggests to you are mistakes. Learn to squash them. Constantly ask yourself, How would I do this if I were a fool? Throttle down your mind to a crawl. Then youll never go wrong.
Herman Wouk
The Cain Mutiny

" Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.
Frank Lloyd Wright

" I’m all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.
Frank Lloyd Wright

" The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines - so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings.
Frank Lloyd Wright

" My ideas have undergone a process of emergence by emergency. When they are needed badly enough, they are accepted.
Buckminster Fuller

" When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
Buckminster Fuller

2

“Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.”
-Bernard Berenson

3

Harry Weese of Chicago was impressed by the gaggle of three-word mottoes that were so often taken to heart 6 and 7 decades ago: “Less is more”, “Form follows function”, “Machine for living”, “Architecture = frozen music”, and so forth.
So he decided to add one: “Flat roofs leak”.

4

Structural engineering maxims I learned in school:

Gravity always works … eventually.

Every couple has its moment.

5

Wow John, those made me groan, LOL. Good to hear from you!

6

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.
-Frank Lloyd Wright

7

Nice one Doug. Here are a few more:

If you don’t have the time to do it right, what makes you think you’ll have the time to do it twice?
Every Architect Ever Born

Never draw more in the morning than you can erase in the afternoon
Alan

We are not paying you for what you know, we are paying you for what you can figure out. Just try to be right more often than not.
Jim Kelly, LPA

“It costs a lot to build bad products”

  • Norman Augustine

"I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

  • Blaise Pascal

A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people."
-Will Rogers

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.
-Mark Twain

Professionalism is a personal attribute that one acquires; it cannot be inherited or bequeathed; Only they having made the acquisition, who put to use that knowledge, that skill, and with all their ability, and complete dedication of purpose, can truly be called a Professional.

  • R.E Onstad

Mere precedent is a dangerous source of authority."
-Andrew Jackson,
7th U.S. president

The Code of Hammurabi created ca. 1760 BC

If a builder build a house for some one, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.

If it kill the son of the owner the son of that builder shall be put to death.

If it kill a slave of the owner, then he shall pay slave for slave to the owner of the house.

If it ruin goods, he shall make compensation for all that has been ruined, and inasmuch as he did not construct properly this house which he built and it fell, he shall re-erect the house from his own means.

If a builder build a house for some one, even though he has not yet completed it; if then the walls seem toppling, the builder must make the walls solid from his own means.

8

From one of my favorite Presidents all-time, and yours too, I am sure…

It is easier to do a job right than to explain why you didn’t.

Martin Van Buren

9

Having heard from A. Jackson, M. Van Buren and T. Roosevelt so far, let me go back to Jackson and add a principle of value to specifiers - while we are waiting for the M. Fillmore entry:
“Anyone who can spell a word only one way certainly lacks imagination.”

10

“No building is safer than at that moment just prior to occupancy”.

“Faster, better, cheaper is an oxymoron”.

“Owners get to pick ONLY 2 of these three-- Cost;
Scope; Quality”

“Good design and bad detailing CANNOT co-exist”

“There is need to know much [but not all] about every aspect of practice, even if you only work in one of them [think about your doctor]”

11

Quotes from comic Emo Phillips:

“Some mornings it just doesn’t seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps.”

“When it comes to my health, I think of my body as a temple … or at least a moderately well-managed Presbyterian youth center.”

12

“Look at drawings in the field and specs in court”

13

Heard coming down the hall from the small room with 3 fixtures—

“Mom”, we’re outta of specs"!!!

14

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. No one is entitled to their own facts. Attributed: Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003)

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think. Ambrose Bierce (1848-1914)

Make money and the whole nation will conspire to call you a gentleman. G B Shaw (1856-1950)

“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.” H. G. Wells (1866-1946)

A nightmare is like bad food; it passes

I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. George Best (1946-2005)

Pay no attention to what the critics say. Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic! Jean Sibelius (1865 - 1957)

We are born naked, wet, and hungry. Then things get worse.

Buildings don’t exist to be pinned, like brooches, on the front of bigger structures to which they bear only the most distant of relationships. Paul Goldberger (1950-)

There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday…around age 11. Dave Berry (1947-)

“The secret to success is knowing who to blame for your failures.” Larry Kersten

Dont bother looking for trouble. Itll find you all on its own. Eric Flint (1947-)

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress. Lord Byron (1788-1824)

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. Napoleon (1769-1821)

24 hours in a day; 24 beers in a case. Coincidence? You decide.

Im sorry that I allowed you to mislead yourself so badly.

15

“There comes a time in the affairs of men when we must take the bull by the tail and face the situation.”

W.C. Fields

16

“We have met the enemy and he is us” - Pogo

17

Quote from an architect the other day at a jobsite meeting one of my colleagues attended - “I will tell you what, when, and where, but never how”

18

Hmmm.. we don’t tell them when, but we do tell them how (to some degree).

19

How is the contractor’s responsibility. As soon as you enter into that area, you assume risk you may not want. I assume that by when you mean the project schedule, rather than completion date. :wink:

20

Every single connection detail is a How, but we are getting off topic here