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Home  »  Respectfully Quoted  »  Daniel Hudson Burnham (1846–1912)

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.

 
NUMBER: 1360
AUTHOR: Daniel Hudson Burnham (1846–1912)
QUOTATION: Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.
ATTRIBUTION: Attributed to DANIEL H. BURNHAM. While Burnham expressed these thoughts in a paper he read before the Town Planning Conference, London, 1910, the exact words were reconstructed by Willis Polk, Burnham’s San Francisco partner. Polk used the paragraph on Christmas cards in 1912 after Burnham’s death in June of that year.—Henry H. Saylor, “Make No Little Plans,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects, March 1957, pp. 95–99.
SUBJECTS: Plans