Top 100 R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes
#2. If we dump all the machinery and take the knowledge we have in the ocean within six months humanity will die. If we dump all the politician all around the world in the ocean everything will go along very nicely.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#4. Windmills installed around the world converting their direct current into alternating current and feeding the electric energy into the world network can harvest the planet Earth's prime daily energy income source-the wind
and adequately supply all the world's energy needs
R. Buckminster Fuller
#5. It is essential that anyone reading this book know at the outset that the author is apolitical. I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#7. The further art advances the closer it approaches science, the further science advances the closer it approaches art.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#9. Universe is the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#10. Universe to each must be
All that is, including me.
Environment in turn must be
All that is, excepting me.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#14. You can't change the way people think, all you can do is give them a tool, the use of which will change their thinking.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#15. People never leave a sinking ship until they see the lights of another ship approaching.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#16. All children are born geniuses; 9,999 out of every 10,000 are swiftly, inadvertently degeniusized by grownups.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#17. One of humanity's prime drives is to understand and be understood. All other living creatures are designed for highly specialized tasks. Man seems unique as the comprehensive comprehender
and co-ordinator of local universe affairs.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#18. Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his co-ordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#20. Truth is cosmically total: synergetic. Verities are generalized principles stated in semimetaphorical terms. Verities are differentiable. But love is omniembracing, omnicoherent, and omni-inclusive, with no exceptions. Love, like synergetics, is nondifferentiable, i.e., is integral.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#21. Love is omni-inclusive, progressively exquisite, understanding and compassionately attuned to other than self.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#23. Architects, if they are really to be comprehensive, must assume the enormous task of thinking in terms always disciplined to the scale of the total world pattern of needs, its resource flows, its recirculatory and regenerative processes.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#25. We are here as local information harvesters, local problem-solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. The fact that we get away from physical problems doesn't mean we go away from problems. The problems are really rarely physical.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#27. Thou mayest as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading. Too much overcharges Nature, and turns more into disease than nourishment. 'Tis thought and digestion which makes books serviceable, and give health and vigor to the mind.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#28. Always tell only the truth, and all the truth, and do so promptly - right now.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#30. Tombs are the clothes of the dead and a grave is a plain suit; while an expensive monument is one with embroidery.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#33. Ignorance and greed are part of the evolutionary process, which is just to say that mistakes are part of learning. There is nothing bad about behaviors or perceptions that do not work; they simply have to be given up and replaced by behaviors or perceptions that do work.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#34. Integrity is the courage and self-discipline to cooperate and initiate according to the Divine, which you know in your heart as Truth.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#37. The Things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#38. The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear. This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#39. Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#40. Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#41. If man chooses oblivion, he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders. If he chooses Utopia, he must initiate an enormous education program - immediately, if not sooner.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#46. By the time you are 88 years old, you "have consumed 300 tons of food, air and water."
R. Buckminster Fuller
#49. History's political and economic power structures have always abhorred 'idle people' as potential troublemakers. Yet nature never abhors seemingly idle trees, grass, snails, coral reefs, and clouds in the sky.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#53. I set about fifty-five years ago (1927) to see what a penniless, unknown human individual with a dependent wife and newborn child might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity
R. Buckminster Fuller
#54. Whatever humans have learned had to be learned as a consequence only of trial and error experience. Humans have learned only through mistakes.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#56. The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy
R. Buckminster Fuller
#57. We are most probably here for local information-gathering and local-Universe problem-solving in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#59. You have to decide whether you want to make money or make sense, because the two are mutually exclusive.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#60. I am deeply impressed with the designer of the universe; I am confident I couldnt have done anywhere near such a good job.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#64. It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It is a mater of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#65. There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#66. Dwell not too long upon sports: for as they refresh a man that is weary, so they weary a man that is refreshed.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#67. Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#69. If you are the master be sometimes blind, if you are the servant be sometimes deaf.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#71. Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#72. How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#73. All of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth, and all the truth, and to do so promptly -right now.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#75. I look for what needs to be done. After all, that's how the universe designs itself.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#76. To do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#77. The difference between mind and brain is that brain deals only with memorized, subjective, special-case experiences and objective experiments, while mind extracts and employs the
generalized principles and integrates and interrelates their effective employment.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#78. There is something patently insane about all the typewriters sleeping with all the beautiful plumbing in the beautiful office buildings -and all the people sleeping in the slums.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#80. Relativity is inherently convergent, though convergent toward a plurality of centers of abstract truths.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#81. Out of my general world-pattern-trend studies there now comes strong evidence that nothing is going to be quite so surprising and abrupt in the future history of man as the forward evolution in the educational process.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#83. If I ran a school, I'd give the average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers, for being good parrots. I'd give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they learned from them.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#84. Humans have always unknowingly affected all Universe by every act and thought they articulate or even consider.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#85. The explicable requires the inexplicable. Experience requires the nonexperienceable. The obvious requires the mystical.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#87. It is not for me to change you. The question is, how can I be of service to you without diminishing your degrees of freedom?
R. Buckminster Fuller
#88. Are you spontaneously enthusiastic about everyone having everything you can have?
R. Buckminster Fuller
#89. We are operating at an overall mechanical efficiency of only four percent ... Therefore, we find that if we increase the overall mechanical efficiency to only twelve percent we can take care of everybody. That three-fold increase in the overall efficiency can only be accomplished by redesign.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#90. Specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the 'expert' is fooled into accepting a slavery by making him feel that he in turn is a socially and culturally preferred-ergo, highly secure-lifelong position.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#91. It is one of the strange facts of experience that when we try to think about the future, our thoughts jump backwards. It may well be that nature has some fundamental metaphysical law by which opening up what we call the future also opens up the past in equal degree.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#93. Observation of my life to date shows that the larger the number for whom I work, the more positively effective I become. Thus, it is obvious that if I work always and only for all humanity, I will be optimally effective.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#94. The synergetic integral of the totality of all principles is God, whose sum-total behavior in pure principle is beyond our comprehension and is utterly mysterious to us, because as humans
in pure principle
we do not and never will know all the principles
R. Buckminster Fuller
#96. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#98. Topology is the science of fundamental pattern and structural relationships of event constellations.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#99. Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction.
R. Buckminster Fuller
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