Buckminster Fuller Quotes

158 Sourced Quotes

Children will draw pictures with everything in them...houses and trees and people and animals...and the sun AND the moon. Grown-up says, "That's a nice picture, Honey, but you put the moon and the sun in the sky at the same time and that isn't right." But the child is right! The sun and moon are in the sky at the same time.

Buckminster Fuller
Neither the great political or financial powers of the world nor the population in general realize that the engineering-chemical-electronic revolution now makes it possible to produce many more technical devices with ever less material. We can now take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than anybody has ever known. It does not have to be you or me, so selfishness is unnecessary and war is obsolete. This has never been done before. Only twelve years ago technology reached the point where this could be done. Since then it has made it ever so much easier to do.

Buckminster Fuller
Synergy is the only word in our language which identifies the meaning for which it stands. Since the word is unknown to the average public, as I have already pointed out, it is not at all surprising that synergy has not been included in the economic accounting of our wealth transactions or in assessing our common wealth capabilities.

Buckminster Fuller
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.

Buckminster Fuller
In spite of all humans' innate interest in the interrelatedness of all experience, long ago these world-power-structure builders learned to shunt all the bright intellectuals and the physically creative into specialist careers. The powerful reserved for themselves the far easier, because innate, comprehensive functioning. All one needs to do is to discover how self-perpetuating is this disease of specialization is to witness the inter-departmental battling for educational funds and the concomitant jealous guarding of the various specializations assigned to a department's salaried experts on each subject in any university.

Buckminster Fuller
Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less. He may learn that what he thought was true was not true. By the elimination of a false premise, his basic capital wealth which in his given lifetime is disembarrassed of further preoccupation with considerations of how to employ a worthless time-consuming hypothesis. Freeing his time for its more effective exploratory investment is to give man increased wealth.

Buckminster Fuller
Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate "comprehensivity." Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us.

Buckminster Fuller
Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.

Buckminster Fuller
The question of integrity will get finer and finer and more delicate and more beautiful.

Buckminster Fuller
Gravity is the inwardly cohering force acting integratively on all systems. Radiation is the outwardly disintegrating force acting divisively upon all systems.

Buckminster Fuller
Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys — legally enacted game-playing — agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and its all unwitting members.

Buckminster Fuller
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.

Buckminster Fuller
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. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual's leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war.

Buckminster Fuller
Universe to each must be All that is, including me. Environment in turn must be All that is, excepting me.

Buckminster Fuller
Take the initiative. Go to work, and above all co-operate and don't hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the intellectual integrity governing universe.

Buckminster Fuller
The explicable requires the inexplicable. Experience requires the nonexperienceable. The obvious requires the mystical. This is a powerful group of paired concepts generated by the complementarity of conceptuality.

Buckminster Fuller
Change the environment; do not try to change man.

Buckminster Fuller
You have to decide whether you want to make money or make sense, because the two are mutually exclusive.

Buckminster Fuller
Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - "which is the mostest? which is the leastest?" They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.

Buckminster Fuller
The effective decisions can only be made by the independently thinking and adequately informed human individuals and their telepathically intercommunicated wisdom—the wisdom of the majority of all such human individuals—qualifying for continuance in Universe as local cosmic problem-solvers—in love with the truth and in individually spontaneous self-commitment to absolute faith in the wisdom, integrity, and love of God, who seems to wish Earthian humans to survive.

Buckminster Fuller
Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers.

Buckminster Fuller
The Universe consists of non-simultaneously apprehended events.

Buckminster Fuller
Here is God's purpose –
for God, to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun,
proper or improper.

Buckminster Fuller
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
My ideas have undergone a process of emergence by emergency. When they are needed badly enough, they are accepted.

Buckminster Fuller
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
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
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
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
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