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

“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

“Dare to be naive.”
― 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

“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'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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

“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

“Either war is obsolete or men are.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