R. Buckminster Fuller Quotations

Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

I look for what needs to be done. After all, that's how the universe designs itself.

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

Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.

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

How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.

I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.

What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.

Parents are usually more careful to bestow knowledge on their children rather than virtue, the art of speaking well rather than doing well; but their manners should be of the greatest concern.

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.

A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.

One in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a wage.

Let architects sing of aesthetics that bring Rich clients in hordes to their knees; Just give me a home, in a great circle dome Where stresses and strains are at ease.

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.

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

Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.

The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.

I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.

People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.

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.

Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't.

Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.

Rashness is the faithful, but unhappy parent of misfortune.

We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.

The most important thing about Spaceship Earth - an instruction book didn't come with it.

Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices.

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.

You can never learn less; you can only learn more.

By 2000, politics will simply fade away. We will not see any political parties.

If you are the master be sometimes blind, if you are the servant be sometimes deaf.

God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.

A proverb is much matter distilled into few words.

Gold and silver from the dead turn often into lead.

Here is God's purpose - For God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper; is the articulation not the art, objective or subjective; is loving, not the abstraction "love" commanded or entreated; is knowledge dynamic, not legislative code, not proclamation law, not academic dogma, not ecclesiastic canon. Yes, God is a verb, the most active, connoting the vast harmonic reordering of the universe from unleashed chaos of energy.

Man knows so much and does so little.

Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

Tombs are the clothes of the dead and a grave is a plain suit; while an expensive monument is one with embroidery.

God is a verb, not a noun proper or improper.

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

War is obsolete. We are not here to fight something or tear something down; We are here to be the example of what is possible. Any sane individual will tell you that violence is ... not the way...

The further art advances the closer it approaches science, the further science advances the closer it approaches art.

On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate

Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences.

You either make sense or you make money.

The explicable requires the inexplicable. Experience requires the nonexperienceable. The obvious requires the mystical.

A pattern has an integrity independent of the medium by virtue of which you have received the information that it exists.

Each one of us has something to contribute. This really depends on each one doing their own thinking, but not following any kind of rule...

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.

Universe is synergetic. Life is synergetic.

Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.

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.

Does humanity have a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how?

Bite your tongue. Get a cinder in your eye. When you feel good, you feel nothing.

To expose a 4.2 Trillion dollar ripoff of the American people by the stockholders of the 1000 largest corporations over the last one-hundred years will be a tall order of business.

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

We are most probably here for local information-gathering and local-Universe problem-solving in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe.

Don't change the man. Change his environment.

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

on first priority in design consideration is the full realization of individual potential in order to reach the second derivative full realization for all individuals

The eternal is omniembracing and permeative; and the temporal is linear. This opens up a very high order of generalizations of generalizations. The truth could not be more omni-important, although it is often manifestly operative only as a linear identification of a special-case experience on a specialized subject.

There is no such thing as genius, some children are just less damaged than others.

We are operating at an overall mechanical efficiency of only four percent... Therefore, we find that if we increase the overall mechanical efficiency to only twelve percent we can take care of everybody. That three-fold increase in the overall efficiency can only be accomplished by redesign.

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?

We will always have war until there is enough of every essential to support all lives everywhere around earth.

The pyramids, attached with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.

We speak erroneously of "artificial" materials, "synthetics", and so forth. The basis for this erroneous terminology is the notion that Nature has made certain things which we call natural, and everything else is "man-made", ergo artificial. But what one learns in chemistry is that Nature wrote all the rules of structuring; man does not invent chemical structuring rules; he only discovers the rules. All the chemist can do is find out what Nature permits, and any substances that are thus developed or discovered are inherently natural. It is very important to remember that.

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting.

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.

What the scientists have always found by physical experiment was an a priori orderliness of nature, or Universe always operating at an elegance level that made the discovering scientist's working hypotheses seem crude by comparison. The discovered reality made the scientists exploratory work seem relatively disorderly.

Controlled time is our true wealth.

Consisting mostly of recirculating scrapped metals, 80% of all the metals that have ever been mined are still at work.

For man to go from less than 1% haves to 40%, living at high standard - despite decreasing resources - cannot be explained by anything other than by doing more than less.

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.

People never leave a sinking ship until they see the lights of another ship approaching.

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.

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

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.

Here is an educational bombshell: Take from all of today's industrial nations all their industrial machinery and all their energy-distributing networks, and leave them all their ideologies, all their political leaders, and all their political organizations, and I can tell you that within six months, two billion people will die of starvation, having gone through great pain and deprivation along the way.

Havenotness is caused by society's failure to design and produce the right tools and goods. Money alone is not the panacea.

You can make money or you can make sense. The two are mutually exclusive.

Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to "make it" economically on this planet and in the Universe. We do.

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.

In order for a world-around democracy to prosper, world society must learn how to prosper.

His Unique Selling Position was to make the world work for 100% of humanity. .

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.

Unity is plural and, at a minimum, is two.

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.

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, & as-yet unsolved problems.

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.

Life is the spirit incarnate in time.

Topology is the science of fundamental pattern and structural relationships of event constellations.

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.

I call intuition cosmic fishing. You feel a nibble, then you've got to hook the fish.

Degrees of accuracy are only degrees of refinement and magnitude in no way affects the fundamental reliability, which refers, as directional or angular sense, toward centralized truths. Truth is a relationship.

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.

Always tell only the truth, and all the truth, and do so promptly - right now.

Everything can be linked together in some fashion, in either a physical, psychological, or symbolic manner.