Top 100 Buckminster's Quotes
#1. I woke up once in the middle of the night, and Buckminster's paws were on my eyelids. He must have been feeling my nightmares.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#3. 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
#4. A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#5. Above all, I am motivated by the most mysterious drive we ever experience -that of love - I don't think there's any influence on my life that compares with love.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#6. Havenotness is caused by society's failure to design and produce the right tools and goods. Money alone is not the panacea.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#8. 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
#10. My biggest hope that we're going to make it here is that this thinking is being manifested & really employed by the young world. Will they be going fast enough to overcome the initiatives of the bureaucracies & the fears operative in those bureaucracies? It's a very touch & go question.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#11. Whether humanity is to comprehensively prosper ... depends entirely on the integrity of the human individuals and not on the political and economic systems. The cosmic question has been asked: are humans worthwhile to universe invention?
R. Buckminster Fuller
#13. If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#14. The minute you choose to do what you really want to do,
it's a different kind of life.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#15. Architects (should) involve themselves continuously in anticipatory design as recommended by Buckminster Fuller
Cedric Price
#16. Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#17. Reform the environment and not man; being absolutely confident that if you give man the right environment, he will behave favorably.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#18. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment ... Humanity is in 'final exam' as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe
R. Buckminster Fuller
#19. The question of integrity will get finer and finer and more delicate and more beautiful.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#20. We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief ... In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#21. 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
#22. As one of my teachers, Buckminster Fuller, says, we were given a right foot and a left foot, not a right foot and a wrong foot. The point is that, there's always two points of view out there, and we need to increase our ability to allow another point of view. Then we have a better chance for peace.
Robert Kiyosaki
#24. 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
#26. I call intuition cosmic fishing. You feel a nibble, then you've got to hook the fish.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#27. 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
#28. I say that radiation is inherently disintegrative: it comes apart. Gravity is inherently integrative: it pulls together. And to me, there's a good possibility that love is what I'd call metaphysical gravity. It really holds everything together.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#29. Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system's separate parts or any subassembly of
the system's parts.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#30. There is room enough indoors in New York City for the whole 1963 world's population to enter, with room enough inside for all hands to dance the twist in average nightclub proximity.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#33. Our beds are empty two-thirds of the time. Our living rooms are empty seven-eighths of the time. Our office buildings are empty one-half of the time. It's time we gave this some thought.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#34. I look for what needs to be done. After all, that's how the universe designs itself.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#35. We should stop kidding ourselves. We should let go of things that aren't true. It's always better with the truth.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#37. Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.
Thomas Fuller
#38. None of the world's problems will have a solution until the world's individuals become thoroughly self-educated.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#39. There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#40. Love is omni-inclusive, progressively exquisite, understanding and compassionately attuned to other than self.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#41. Don't attempt to reform man. An adequately organized environment will permit humanity's original, innate capabilities to become successful.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#42. The individual can take initiatives without anybody's permission. Only individuals can think. Only the individual disregards his fears and commits himself exclusively to reforming the human environment.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#43. The assumption is that the inevitability of a solution's realization is inherent in the interaction of human intellect and the constantly transformative evolution of physical universe.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#44. The self-commissioned architect is the obviously exclusive potential - for as at present used, or designed, the world's resources are serving only forty-four per cent of humanity.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#45. The minute you begin to do what you really want to do, it's really a different kind of life.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#46. What has not been clear is that the potential of this emergency-born technology has always accrued to human's prewar individual initiatives taken in a humble but irrepressible progression
of assumptions, measurements, deductions, and codifications of pure science.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#47. 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
#48. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living
R. Buckminster Fuller
#52. Brain deals exclusively with the physical, and mind exclusively with the metaphysical.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#53. The further art advances the closer it approaches science, the further science advances the closer it approaches art.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#55. 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
#56. 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
#59. Initiative can neither be created nor delegated. It can only spring from the self-determining individual, who decides that the wisdom of others is not always better than his own.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#60. Get ready the greatest new educational facility at the approximate dynamic population center of the North American continent
R. Buckminster Fuller
#61. I want to be known as a professional weirdo. There aren't many Salvador Dalis or Buckminster Fullers left. If I become popular enough, I can establish the next step for records.
Todd Rundgren
#62. How much does your building weigh?
A question often used to challenge architects to consider how efficiently materials were used for the space enclosed.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#63. When individuals join in a cooperative venture, the power generated far exceeds what they could have accomplished acting individually.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#64. Buckminster Fuller was one of those world historic geniuses who reminded us of the extraordinary things that are possible, and inspires all of us to set about doing them!
Marianne Williamson
#65. The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways. The metaphysical is antientropic, methodically marshalling energy. Life is antientropic. It is spontaneously inquisitive. It sorts out and endeavors to understand
R. Buckminster Fuller
#66. For the first time in history it is now possible to take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. Only ten years ago the 'more with less' technology reached the point where this could be done. All humanity now has the option to become enduringly successful.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#67. 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
#70. Humanity is now experiencing history's most difficult evolutionary transformation.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#71. A problem adequately stated is a problem solved theoretically and immediately, and therefore subsequently to be solved, realistically.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#73. We have reached the point where we are now possessed of sufficient information for each individual human to dare to exercise the option to "make it" rather than having to depend on the decisions of an educated elite.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#74. Nature does have manure and she does have roots as well as blossoms, and you can't hate the manure and blame the roots for not being blossoms.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#76. Frost interviewing Noel Coward and Margaret Mead. Sir Noel's view of life is Sir Noel. Mead's mind is large and open, like Buckminster Fuller's. She found thoughts dull that suggest that men are superior to animals or plants.
John Cage
#77. People never leave a sinking ship until they see the lights of another ship approaching.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#78. 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
#79. Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#83. 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
#84. You cannot change how someone thinks, but you can give them a tool to use which will lead them to think differently.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#85. 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
#86. All children are born geniuses; 9,999 out of every 10,000 are swiftly, inadvertently degeniusized by grownups.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#87. I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#88. Right now I am a passenger on space vehicle Earth zooming about the Sun at 60,000 miles per hour somewhere in the solar system.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#89. The most important thing about Spaceship Earth - an instruction book didn't come with it.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#90. God is the great comprehensive a priori integrity of Universe within which human beings find themselves to be operating.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#91. Nature is all that we think we know plus all that we don't know whether or not we know that we don't know it.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#92. 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
#96. American labor will realize that its function is not to increase jobs, but to multiply the wealth and to expand the numbers benefited by the wealth at the swiftest possible rate.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#97. Universe to each must be
All that is, including me.
Environment in turn must be
All that is, excepting me.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#98. Universe is the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#99. Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.
R. Buckminster Fuller
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