All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!

Men have looked upon the desert as barren land, the free holding of whoever chose; but in fact each hill and valley in it had a man who was its acknowledged owner and would quickly assert the right of his family or clan to it, against aggression.

I've been & am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen & I'm quite ordinary, & will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I'm one of the few people who tell the truth about myself.

Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals.

Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven.

The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern commander.

All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!

The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor.

Isn't it true that the fault of birth rests somewhat on the child? I believe it's we who led our parents on to bear us, and it's our unborn children who make our flesh itch.

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.

The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God.

This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought.

It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts, the desert, or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed.

To have news value is to have a tin can tied to one's tail.

To me an unnecessary action, or shot, or casualty, was not only waste but sin.

A first difficulty of the Arab movement was to say who the Arabs were. Being a manufactured people, their name had been changing in sense slowly year by year. Once it meant an Arabian. There was a country called Arabia; but this was nothing to the point.

A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, having bartered his soul to a brute-master. He is not of them. He may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have been.

All men dream, but nor equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible. This I did.

Arab civilizations had been of an abstract nature, moral and intellectual rather than applied; and their lack of public spirit made their excellent private qualities futile. They were fortunate in their epoch: Europe had fallen barbarous; and the memory of Greek and Latin learning was fading from men's minds.

Bedouin ways were hard even for those brought up to them, and for strangers, terrible: a death in life.

Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.

I've been & am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen & I'm quite ordinary, & will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I'm one of the few people who tell the truth about myself.

The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly.

The desert Arab found no joy like the joy of voluntarily holding back. He found luxury in abnegation, renunciation, self restraint. He made nakedness of the mind as sensuous as nakedness of the body. He saved his own soul, perhaps, and without danger, but in a hard selfishness.

The foreigners come out here always to teach, whereas they had much better learn, for, in everything but wits and knowledge, the Arab is generally the better man of the two.

We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves; yet when we achieved, and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew.

When I am angry, I pray God to swing our globe into the fiery sun and prevent the sorrows of the not-yet-born: but when I am content, I want to lie forever in the shade, till I become a shade myself.

Dream your dreams with open eyes and make them come true.

This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words and indeed in thought.

It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it, such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts, the desert, or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed.

In addressing a task, one almost always has several possible options, sometimes only a few, and they may all be practical and functional. But they lack the aesthetic aspect that raises it to architecture.

People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming.

The organizational architecture is really that a centipede walks on hundred legs and one or two don't count. So if I lose one or two legs, the process will go on, the organization will go on, the growth will go on.

The intellectual architecture means focusing on doing great work instead of focusing on agency politics.

Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that's all.

The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe.

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

My interest in architecture has always been sculptural. Most of my photography is of architecture.

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture.

I studied architecture in New York. So, really I was very moved, like everyone else, to try to contribute something that has that resonance and profundity of it means to all of us.

Architecture in general is frozen music.

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.

The team architecture means setting up an organization that helps people produce that great work in teams.

French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture; like Roman design, it looks to the community.

What is being called the UN 'gender architecture' is more like a shack. Women need a bigger global house if equality is ever to become a reality.

Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.