That has been another interesting discovery: that basically a city [Lagos] could recover from a really deep, deep, deep pit.

Evil can also be beautiful. The Coliseum in Rome, for example, a wonderful structure with an awful past. Just think about the bloody gladiator fights there.

A building has at least two lives - the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward - and they are never the same.

Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.

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.

Architects work in two ways. One is to respond precisely to a client's needs or demands. Another is to look at what the client asks and reinterpret it.

It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces.

Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.

The good is not a category that interests me.

Find optimism in the inevitable.

The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.

How we give matters. If your thoughts & goals are selfish, than so be your fief. For it is through the heart that we prosper & through each other that we grow.

I pray with my knees bow.

I was completely and irrevocably in lust

The damnest scoundrel that ever lived, but in the infinite mercy of Providence... also the damnest fool.

As spirits we have always existed in a generalized form, since we are all part of the universe. As individual spirits, we have existed for a timeless time.

Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

All truths are old, and all that we have to do is recognize and utter them anew.

People call Kong "a monster." He's not. There's nothing evil about Kong. He's just another creature who has opened up a little bit of his heart to Ann and it proves to be his undoing.

It is not our business to make the message acceptable, but to make it available. We are not to see that they like it, but that they get it.

I wasn't out drinking and abusing my body. I simply loved to go out and dance.