Richard Buckminster Fuller > Quotes

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

“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.
”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“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.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“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.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing…after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“I'm not trying to counsel any of you to do anything really special except dare to think. And to dare to go with the truth. And to dare to really love completely.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“Dare to be naive.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that 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 living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller, I Seem To Be A Verb

“I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren't any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn't be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life's challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person. ”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“Geniuses are just people who had good mothers.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

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

“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.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do... HOW WOULD I BE? WHAT WOULD I DO?”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”
― Richard 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.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller, Only Integrity Is Going to Count: Integrity Day, Los Angeles February 26, 1983

“Love is omni-inclusive, progressively exquisite, understanding and compassionately attuned to other than self.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“I am a passenger on the spaceship Earth.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“Either war is obsolete or men are. ”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“I figure...

...that the people are now more deeply conscious than ever before in history of the existence and functioning principles of universal, inexorable physical laws; of the pervading, quietly counseling truth within each and every one of us; of the power of love; and--each man by himself--of his own developing, dynamic relationship with his own conception of the Almightiness of the All-Knowing.

...that our contemporaries just don't wear their faith on their sleeves anymore.

...that people have removed faith from their sleeves because they found out for themselves that faith is much too important for careless display. Now they are willing to wait out the days and years for the truthful events, encouraged individually from within; and the more frequently the dramatic phrases advertising love, patriotism, fervent belief, morals, and good fellowship are plagiarized, appropriated and exhibited in the show windows of the world by the propaganda whips for indirect and ulterior motives, no matter how meager the compromise--the more do people withdraw within themselves and shun taking issue with the nauseating perversions, though eternally exhibiting quiet indifference, nonchalance or even cultivating seemingly ignorant acceptance.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller, Cosmography: A Posthumous Scenario For The Future Of Humanity

“It is essential that anyone reading this book know at the outset that the author is apolitical. I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller, Grunch of Giants

“I just invent. Then I wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller