Building

A building is a man-made structure with a roof and walls standing more or less permanently in one place.

Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.
- George W. Bush in his "Address to the Nation" (September 11, 2001)

We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.
- Winston Churchill, (1874–1965), cited in: Randal O'Toole The Best-laid Plans, Cato Institute, 2007 p. 161

I read somewhere that the tallest buildings in a town reflect that society’s values; if so, this one screamed that money mattered and beauty didn’t.
- Stephen Dedman, The Devotee, in David G. Hartwell (ed.) Year's Best SF 6, p. 163 (Originally published in Eidolon magazine, Autumn 2000)

Dancing and architecture are the two primary and essential arts. The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite.
- Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life (1923).

I approach each building as a sculptural object, a spatial container, a space with light and air, a response to context and appropriateness of feeling and spirit. To this container, this sculpture, the user brings his baggage, his program, and interacts with it to accommodate his needs. If he can't do that, I've failed.
- Frank Gehry in: Blueprint. Nr. 90-92, 1992

Life is chaotic, dangerous, and surprising. Buildings should reflect that.
- Frank Gehry in: Jason K. Miller, ‎Susan Lauzau (2002) Frank Gehry. p. 6

Three things are to be looked to in a building: that it stand on the right spot; that it be securely founded; that it be successfully executed.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities (1809), Bk. I, Ch. 9

I knew, as everyone knows, that the easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place some one is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will mean sudden death. That's what attracts us to the man who paints the flagstaff on the tall building, or to the 'human fly' who scales the walls of the same building.
- Harry Houdini As quoted in The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini‎ (1993) by Ruth Brandon, p. 153

There can be little doubt that in many ways the story of bridge building is the story of civilisation. By it we can readily measure an important part of a people’s progress.
- Franklin D Roosevelt, in Kurilpa Bridge, p. 72

A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
- Ayn Rand, in Onlogic: Speed and Vision, (2008)

We require from buildings, as from men, two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it; which last is itself another form of duty.
- John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Volume I, Chapter II.

I do not believe that ever any building was truly great, unless it had mighty masses, vigorous and deep, of shadow mingled with its surface.
- John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), chapter III, paragraph 24.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning. There should not be a single ornament put upon great civic buildings, without some intellectual intention.
- John Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Lamp of Memory.

To be a man is to be responsible: to be ashamed of miseries you did not cause; to be proud of your comrades' victories; to be aware, when setting one stone, that you are building a world.
- Antoine de Saint Exupéry Wind, Sand and Stars,' (1939), p. 93

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Building

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