Wright Quotes

“In honoring the Wright Brothers, it is customary and proper to recognize their contribution to scientific progress. But I believe it is equally important to emphasize the qualities in their pioneering life and the character in man that such a life produced. The Wright Brothers balanced success with modesty, science with simplicity. At Kitty Hawk their intellects and senses worked in mutual support. They represented man in balance, and from that balance came wings to lift a world.”

“I read a lot of books. Here are the books I'm using for my 9/11 project. [Wright gestures to three six-foot-long shelves of books.] As I read them I highlight certain passages. Then I have an assistant write down each quote on an index card and note where it came from.”

“There are hundreds of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings around the United States and in other countries, too. Wright lived into his 90s, and one of his most famous buildings, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was completed just before his death. Wright buildings look like Wright buildings - that is their paradox.”

“In the dry places, men begin to dream. Where the rivers run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow. West of the 98TH Meridian - where it sometimes rain and it sometimes doesn’t – towns, like weeds, spring up when it rains, dry up when it stops. But in a dry climate, the husk of the plant remains. The stranger might find, as if preserved in amber, something of the green life that was once lived there, and the ghosts of men who have gone on to a better place. The withered towns are empty, but not uninhabited. Faces sometimes peer out from the broken windows, or whisper from the sagging balconies, as if this place – now that is dead – had come to life. As if empty it is forever occupied. Reproduced in THE BORSCHT BELT from The Works of Love by Wright Morris by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1949, 1951 by Wright Morris.”

“...it is always easier to deal with things than with men, and no one can direct his life entirely as he would choose. -Wilbur Wright, 1911”

“What will make you great today will never make you great tomorrow! The airplane that Wilbur and Orville Wright invented in 1906 would be seen as a scrap today. It becomes valueless with time.”

“The last human of importance the American people have been able to keep in the working end of their brain is your own Chicago triggerman, Dillinger. After him they kind of lost hold on keeping who’s who straight. So don’t be surprised if they don’t remember who Cabot Wright is, or if they do.”

“Richard Wright and his Negro intellectual colleagues never realized the plain truth that no one in the United States understood the revolutionary potential of the Negro better than the Negro's white radical allies. They understood it instinctively, and revolutionary theory had little to do with it. What Wright could not see was that what the Negro's allies feared most of all was that this sleeping, dream-walking black giant might wake up and direct the revolution all by himself, relegating his white allies to a humiliating second-class status. The negro's allies were not about to tell the Negro anything that might place him on the path to greater power and independence in the revolutionary movement than they themselves had. The rules of the power game meant that unless the American Negro taught himself the profound implications of his own revolutionary significance in America, it would never be taught to him by anybody else. Unless the Negro intellectuals understood that in pursuit of this self-understanding, they would have to make their own rules, by and for themselves, nationalism would forever remain--as it was for Wright-- "a bewildering and vexing question.”

“I'm writing a book. I'm almost finished. I numbered the pages. Now all I have to do is fill them in.”