Buckminster Fuller Quotes

158 Sourced Quotes

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
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
We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.

Buckminster Fuller
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
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
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
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
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Buckminster Fuller
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
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
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.

Buckminster Fuller
Universe has no pollution. All the chemistries of the Universe are essential To its comprehensive self regulation.

Buckminster Fuller
All children are born geniuses, and we spend the first six years of their lives degeniusing them.

Buckminster Fuller
Universe is the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences.

Buckminster Fuller
In the United States, throughout all twenty-four hours of every day of the year - year after year - we have an average of two million automobiles standing in front of red lights with their engines going, the energy for which amounts to that generated by the full of efforts of 200 million horses being completley wasted as they jump up and down going nowhere.

Buckminster Fuller
Ideas are easy to come by; reduction to practice is an arduous but inspirationally rewarding matter.

Buckminster Fuller
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.

Buckminster Fuller
We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently inhabit taverns and have no self control.

Buckminster Fuller
It is well known that of every strong woman they say she has a masculine mind.

Buckminster Fuller
A problem adequately stated is a problem well on its way to being solved.

Buckminster Fuller
There is only one revolution tolerable to all men, all societies, all political systems: Revolution by design and invention.

Buckminster Fuller
Don't attempt to reform man. An adequately organized environment will permit humanity's original, innate capabilities to become successful.

Buckminster Fuller
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.

Buckminster Fuller
Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is quite staggering.

Buckminster Fuller
Scientific discovery is invention, and vice versa.

Buckminster Fuller
Whatever humans have learned had to be learned as a consequence only of trial and error experience. Humans have learned only through mistakes.

Buckminster Fuller
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.

Buckminster Fuller
No man can prove upon awakening that he is the man who he thinks went to bed the night before, or that anything that he recollects is anything other than a convincing dream.

Buckminster Fuller
You can't better the world by simply talking to it. Philosophy
to be effective must be mechanically applied.

Buckminster Fuller
It seems that truth is progressive approximation in which the relative fraction of our spontaneously tolerated residual error constantly diminishes.

Buckminster Fuller