Some past quotes...

'It is an architect's business to understand all the styles and to be prejudiced in favour of none.' (Thomas Hopper, 1837)

'Tradition is the alphabet, form is the language, architecture is the poem.' (Richard England)

'Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, for whatsoever uses, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power and pleasure.' (John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Achitecture, 1849)

'Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.' (Ernest Dinmet, What We Live By, 1932)

'Light, God's eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.' (Thomas Fuller 1608-1661)

'If, for the rest, it be asked us to specify what kind of amount of art, style,or other interest in a building, makes it worth protecting, we answer, anything which can be looked on as artistic, picturesque, historical, antique, or substantial: any work, inshort, over which educated, artistic people would think it worth while to argue at all.' (William Morris, SPAB Manifesto 1877)

'When we build, let us think that we build forever.' (John Ruskin, 1819-1900)

'We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us' (Sir Winston Churchill, The Times, 1960)

'Having to save the old that's worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions or human types, is one of our greatest problems and the one we bother about the least.' (John Galsworthy, Over the River)

'Let where it is be what it's made of.' (Vision of Britain)

'Don't clap too hard, its a very old building' (John Osborne, The Entertainer, 1957)

'Design with beauty and build with truth' (motto of the Architectural Association, f.1847)

'An architect must perform the dual role of designer of the future and defender of the past' (Richard England)

'Conservation does not mean blind oposition to progress but opposition to blind progress' (David Mylne, Berwickshire Civic Society Newsletter, 1974)

'The past...a store of possibilities awaiting disclosure and translation into the language of today' (Kirkegaard, in Snodgrass and Coyne's Interpretation in Architecture)

'An arch never sleeps' (James Fergusson)

'Where now the city stands, there was once naught but the city's site' (Ovid)

'The most cruel kind of traffic in Herculaneum' (pre.63AD reference to demolition)

'All art is a fight against decay' (Brian Aldiss, 1971)

'Whatever is good in its kinde ought to be preserv'd in respect for antiquity, as well as our present advantage, for destruction can be profitable to none but such as live by it.' (Nicolas Hawksmoor, 1715)

'In the middle ages, men had no great thoughts which they did not write down in stone.' (Victor Hugo)

'Stave off decay by daily care' (William Morris)

'A monument of antiquity is never seen with indifference...No circumstance so forcibly marks the desolation of a spot once inhabited, as the prevalence of Nature over it' (Thomas Whately, 1770, in Rose Macaulay's Pleasure of Ruins)