Robin Boyd Quotes

#1. We need better architecture and planning: more imaginatively exciting, more involving, more our own.

Robin Boyd

#2. I'm sorry you aren't as brave as you thought you were. But don't punish me because of it.

Sarah Waters

#3. The Australian is forcefully loquacious, until the moment of expressing any emotion. He is aggressively committed to equality and equal-opportunity for all men, except for black Australians. He has high assurance in anything he does combined with a gnawing lack of confidence in anything he thinks.

Robin Boyd

#4. A worthy old scholar, criticising the king's penmanship, pointed out a fault. He, smiling, erased the word, but when the critic was gone, began to restore it, remarking that it was right, but it was better to spoil paper than the self-confidence of an old man.

Flora Annie Steel

#5. Adelaide was the first city in Australia, if not in the world, to provide for the health and recreation of all its citizens.

Robin Boyd

#6. Solemn Australians think that an interest in design is a superficial and trivial interest. This is actually an improvement, they used to think it effeminate and vaguely immoral.

Robin Boyd

#7. I come from a theatrical background, where, if you're working on a movie or a play, you always respect the people you work with. You're accommodating.

Derek Hough

#8. Anything that can be proven cannot last.

Jonah Blank

#9. A bruised silence descended on the van.

Hillary Jordan

#10. Australia is, in fact, an old man's bureaucracy.

Robin Boyd

#11. What George W. Bush learned in his pre-presidential years - and what he omits in his new memoirs - was not how to lead a nation, but how, with sufficient toughness, to cheat the democratic system to get elected.

Nigel Hamilton

#12. Yet the small house, probably more than anything else that man has done, has made the face of Australia and to an extent the faces of Australians. Australia is the small house. Ownership of one in a fenced allotment is as inevitable and unquestionable a goal of the average Australian as marriage.

Robin Boyd

#13. The suburb was the major element of Australian society.

Robin Boyd

#14. Australia's is a special kind of philistinism, an immovable materialism which puts art and ideas of any kind deliberately and firmly to one side to let the serious business of living proceed without distraction.

Robin Boyd

#15. Many new churches, I regret to say, can be described from the design point of view only as holy terrors.

Robin Boyd

#16. No doubt you are wondering what you will find, out there.' The Commandant said it for me.
'Well, it would be useless for me to try and tell you. The desert tells a different story every time one ventures on it ...

Robert Edison Fulton Jr.

#17. When most objects are truly functional, this technological age, which is just beginning, will be truly civilised. When all objects in this country are truly functional, Australia will be as beautiful in its own way as classical Greece.

Robin Boyd