Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller Quotes
158 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
We are on a spaceship; a beautiful one. It took billions of years to develop. We're not going to get another. Now, how do we make this spaceship work?
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
I would say, then, that you are faced with a future in which education is going to be number one amongst the great world industries.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
SPACESHIP EARTH: Earth is an automated Spaceship speeding rotatively at 66,000 miles per hour around the sun, which in turn, is on its own course at 6.0 kilometers per second within the Galactic Nebula. The awareness of Earth's mobile patterning within the cosmos gives the perspective needed to deal with the overall evolutionary event-patterning aboard our spherical space-vehicle Earth, rather than the minute details. The automated events transpiring aboard Earth lend powerful advantages to those who comprehend the automation and attempt to work with it in the most long-term, humanly advantageous ways rather than ignorantly attempting to control or oppose it. Both Earth's and humanity's automation are biological.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
We must progress to the stage of doing all the right things for all the right reasons instead of doing all the right things for all the wrong reasons.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
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.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
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. Brain deals exclusively with the physical, and mind exclusively with the metaphysical.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
We must start with scientific fundamentals, and that means with the data of experiments and not with assumed axioms predicated only upon the misleading nature of that which only superficially seems to be obvious. It is the consensus of great scientists that science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
I think it's absolutely touch-and-go whether we're going to make it. But the point is, for me to tell you that you have an option is not to be optimistic... Time and again, of course I am running into millions who don't know we have the option, because it's invisible, and I feel I have tremendous responsibility. So when people ask me to come and talk to them, I do my best to let them know they do have the option. Of course they're pessimistic, not knowing that.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
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.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
It seemed that the time would come evolutionarily when humans might have acquired enough knowledge of generalized principles to permit a graduation from class-two (entropically selfish) evolution into class-one (syntropically cooperative) evolution, thereafter making all the right moves for all the right reasons.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
It is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate. You can deceive others, you can deceive your brain-self, but you can't deceive your mind-self — for mind deals only in the discovery of truth and the interrelationship of all truths. The cosmic laws with which mind deals are noncorruptible. Cosmic evolution is omniscient God comprehensively articulate.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
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.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
Integrity of the individual is what we're being judged for and if we are not passing that examination, we don't really have the guts, we'll blow ourselves up. It will be all over. I think it's all the difference in the world.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
It is one of our most exciting discoveries that local discovery leads to a complex of further discoveries. Corollary to this we find that we no sooner get a problem solved than we are overwhelmed with a multiplicity of additional problems in a most beautiful payoff of heretofore unknown, previously unrecognized, and as-yet unsolved problems.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
Doing the right things for the wrong reasons is typical of humanity. Precession — not conscious planning — provides a productive outcome for misguided political and military campaigns.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
The highest of generalizations is the synergetic integration of truth and love.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
My ideas have undergone a process of emergence by emergency. When they are needed badly enough, they are accepted.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
Human beings were given a left foot and a right foot to make a mistake first to the left, then to the right, left again and repeat.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I've been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That's a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we're in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
I seek through comprehensive anticipatory design science and its reductions to physical practices to reform the environment instead of trying to reform humans, being intent thereby to accomplish prototyped capabilities of doing more with less...
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
There is nothing that a single massive sphere will or can ever do by itself that says it will both exert and yield attractively with a neighboring massive sphere and that it yields progressively: every time the distance between the two is halved, the attraction will be fourfolded. This unpredicted, only mutual behavior is synergy.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
Here is God's purpose –
for God, to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun,
proper or improper.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
The Universe consists of non-simultaneously apprehended events.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
I am convinced that human continuance depends entirely upon: the intuitive wisdom of each and every individual... the individual's integrity of speaking and acting only on the individual's own within-self-intuited and reasoned initiative... the individual's never joining action with others as motivated only by crowd-engendered-emotionalism, or a sense of the crowd's power to overwhelm, or in fear of holding to the course indicated by one's own intellectual convictions.
Buckminster Fuller
Source
Report...
We're not just dealing in willingness. Humanity has to qualify to survive. You have to have some confidence. We're all born naked, with no external equipment and no experience. Therefore we're terribly ignorant. We're hungry and thirsy, driven to find food by trial and error. So we're designed to live by trial and error. Don't worry about making mistakes. Study your mistakes; admit them, study them, and be terribly excited about them too. If this isn't true, what is true?
Buckminster Fuller
1
2
3
4
5
6
Quote of the day
Never, "for the sake of peace and quiet," deny your own experience or convictions.
Dag Hammarskjöld
Buckminster Fuller
Creative Commons
Born:
July 12, 1895
Died:
July 1, 1983
(aged 87)
Bio:
Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer and inventor.
Known for:
Critical Path (1981)
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1968)
Grunch of Giants (1983)
Nine Chains to the Moon (1938)
Most used words:
universe
humanity
human
truth
integrity
earth
time
physical
individual
synergy
principles
spaceship
behaviors
energy
god
Buckminster Fuller on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Buckminster Fuller Quotes
Buckminster Fuller Short Quotes
Quotes about Buckminster Fuller
American Architect Quotes
Architect Quotes
20th-century Architect Quotes
Related Authors
John Cage
American Composer
Norman Foster
British Architect
Frank Lloyd Wright
American Architect
Isamu Noguchi
American Artist
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes