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Daily Inspiration Quote by Frank Lloyd Wright

"Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles"

About this Quote

Tip the world over and the stuff that isn’t bolted down slides toward Los Angeles: it’s a joke with an architect’s precision and a critic’s bite. Frank Lloyd Wright, who spent his career battling bad taste, cheap imitation, and the deadening effects of mass production, aims this line like a plumb bob. Los Angeles becomes gravity’s basin, not because it’s stable, but because it’s where drift ends up: migrants, money, dreams, hustles, fads, half-built identities. “Everything loose” is the insult and the diagnosis. Loose morals, loose plans, loose attachments to tradition - also loose capital and loose ambition, unmoored from old-world constraints.

The quip works because it captures a real early-20th-century cultural physics. LA was booming on oil, oranges, real estate, and Hollywood, a city famously assembled fast and opportunistically. It offered reinvention at scale, which looks like freedom if you’re arriving and like rootlessness if you’re watching from elsewhere. Wright himself had skin in the game: he built some of his most celebrated work in Southern California, even as he bristled at the region’s stylistic chaos and speculative sprawl. That tension is the subtext: admiration for the energy, contempt for the looseness.

It also flatters the listener’s sense that LA is exceptional, just not necessarily in a noble way. The city becomes America’s centrifugal endpoint - a place where the future collects, glittering and unanchored, before anyone has decided whether that’s paradise or landfill.

Quote Details

TopicWitty One-Liners
Source
Later attribution: Frank Lloyd Wright (Frank Lloyd Wright) modern compilation
Text match: 99.33%   Provider: Wikiquote
Evidence:
tributed tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in los angeles according
Other candidates (1)
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York : Frank Lloyd ... (Wright, Frank Lloyd, 1867-1959, Berg,..., 1975) primary37.9%
ts of the world and from all walks of life have been through this building and have experienced
Cite

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Wright, Frank Lloyd. (2026, February 7). Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/tip-the-world-over-on-its-side-and-everything-137470/

Chicago Style
Wright, Frank Lloyd. "Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles." FixQuotes. February 7, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/tip-the-world-over-on-its-side-and-everything-137470/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles." FixQuotes, 7 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/tip-the-world-over-on-its-side-and-everything-137470/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 - April 9, 1959) was a Architect from USA.

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