Buckminster Fuller Quotes

158 Sourced Quotes

There's a major pattern of energy in universe wherein the very large events, earthquakes, and so forth, occur in any one area of universe very much less frequently than do the small energy events. Around the Earth insects occur more often than do earthquakes. In the patterning of total evolutionary events, there comes a time, once in a while, amongst the myriad of low energy events, when a large energy event transpires and is so disturbing that with their general adaptability lost, the ultra-specialized creatures perish.

Buckminster Fuller

Topology provides the synergetic means of ascertaining the values of any system of experiences. Topology is the science of fundamental pattern and structural relationships of event constellations.

Buckminster Fuller

There are progressive degrees of synergy, called synergy-of-synergies, which are complexes of behavior aggregates holistically unpredicted by the separate behaviors of any of their subcomplex components. Any subcomplex aggregate is only a component aggregation of an even greater event aggregation whose comprehensive behaviors are never predicted by the component aggregates alone. There is a synergetic progression in Universe—a hierarchy of total complex behaviors entirely unpredicted by their successive subcomplexes' behaviors. It is manifest that Universe is the maximum synergy-of-synergies, being utterly unpredicted by any of its parts.

Buckminster Fuller

Up to the Twentieth Century, reality was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear. Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality. Ninety-nine percent of all that is going to affect our tomorrows is being developed by humans using instruments and working in ranges of reality that are nonhumanly sensible.

Buckminster Fuller

I do know that technologically humanity now has the opportunity, for the first time in its history, to operate our planet in such a manner as to support and accommodate all humanity at a substantially more advanced standard of living than any humans have ever experienced.

Buckminster Fuller

You may very appropriately want to ask me how we are going to resolve the ever-acceleratingly dangerous impasse of world-opposed politicians and ideological dogmas. I answer, it will be resolved by the computer.

Buckminster Fuller

Evolution consists of many great revolutionary events taking place quite independently of man's consciously attempting to bring them about. Man is very vain; he likes to feel that he is responsible for all the favorable things that happen, and he is innocent of all the unfavorable happenings. But all the larger evolutionary patternings seeming favorable or unfavorable to man's conditioned reflexing are transpiring transcendentally to any of man's conscious planning or contriving.

Buckminster Fuller

Synergy means behavior of integral, aggregate, whole systems unpredicted by behaviors of any of their components or subassemblies of their components taken separately from the whole.

Buckminster Fuller

There is an inherently minimum set of essential concepts and current information, cognizance of which could lead to our operating our planet Earth to the lasting satisfaction and health of all humanity.

Buckminster Fuller

This book is written with the conviction that there are no "good" or "bad" people, no matter how offensive or eccentric to society they may seem... You and I didn't design people. God designed people. What I am trying to do is to discover why God included humans in Universe.

Buckminster Fuller

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. Caught up in a plethora of conditioned reflexes and driven by the human ego, both warden and prisoner attempt meagerly to compete with God. All are intractably skeptical of what they do not understand.
We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.

Buckminster Fuller

For at least 2,000,000 years men have been reproducing and multiplying on a little automated spaceship called earth.

Buckminster Fuller

If we design the environment properly, it will permit child and man to develop safely and to behave logically.

Buckminster Fuller

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.

Buckminster Fuller

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.

Buckminster Fuller

Dwell not too long upon sports: for as they refresh a man that is weary, so they weary a man that is refreshed.

Buckminster Fuller

The vector equilibrium is the true zero reference of the energetic mathematics. Zero pulsation in the vector equilibrium is the nearest approach we will ever know to eternity and god: the zero phase of conceptual integrity inherent in the positive and negative asymmetries that propagate the differentials of consciousness.

Buckminster Fuller

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.

Buckminster Fuller

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

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

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

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