R. Buckminster Fuller > Quotes

“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

“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path

“Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, I Seem To Be A Verb

“Few realize that political action offers little solution to the world’s major problems. Few understand that the elite have created political parties in order to prevent real change from ever taking place. The political arena is merely the “sty” in which two or more mutually hostile agencies, created by the same hidden hand, get the chance to pummel one another. As alternative researcher Juri Lina so brilliantly put it: When the left wing Freemason is finished, the right-wing Freemason takes over The point has been emphasized by many an insider: The elementary principle of all deception is to attract the enemy’s attention to what you wish him to see and to distract his attention from what you so not wish him to see – General Sir Archibald Wavel The world’s power structures have always ‘divided to conquer’ and have always ‘kept divided to keep conquered.’ As a consequence the power structure has so divided humanity – not only into special function categories but into religious and language and color categories – that individual humans are now helplessly inarticulate in the face of the present crisis. They consider their political representation to be completely corrupted, therefore, they feel almost utterly helpless”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path

“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.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“God is a verb”
― Buckminster Fuller

“Integrity is the essence of everything successful.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“We are powerfully imprisoned by the terms in which we have been conducted to think.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“Today’s news consists of aggregates of fragments. Anyone who has taken part in any event that has subsequently appeared in the news is aware of the gross disparity between the actual and the reported events. We also learn frequently of prefabricated and prevaricated evens of a complex nature purportedly undertaken for the purposes wither of suppressing or rigging the news, which in turn perverts humanity’s tactical information resources. All history becomes suspect. Probably our most polluted resource is the tactical information to which humanity spontaneously reflexes.”
― Buckminster Fuller

“Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

“If we dump all the machinery and take the knowledge we have in the ocean within six months humanity will die. If we dump all the politician all around the world in the ocean everything will go along very nicely.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“Most importantly we have learned that from here on it is success for all or none, for it is experimentally proven by physics that "unity is plural and at minimum two" - the complementary but not mirror-imaged proton and neutron. You and I are inherently different and complimentary. Together we average as zero - that is, as eternity.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

“The minute you begin to do what you really want to do, it's really a different kind of life.”
― R. Buckminister Fuller

“All the present bureaucracies of political governments, great religious organizations, and all big businesses find that physical success for all humanity would be devastating to the perpetuation of their ongoing activities. This is because all of them are founded on the premise of ameliorating individual cases while generally exploiting on behalf of their respective political, religious, or business organizations the condition of no-where-nearly-enough-life-support-for-all and its resultant great human suffering and discontent.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path

“...primarily the individual is going to study at home.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller, Education Automation: Freeing the scholar to return to his studies

“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”
― R. 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.”
― Buckminster Fuller

“Human beings are the only creatures on the planet that tell time and think they have to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller

“The universe is non-simultaneously apprehended”
― 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.”
― R. Buckminister Fuller

“I would say, then, that you are faced with a future in which education is going to be number one amongst the great world industries.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller, Education Automation: Freeing the scholar to return to his studies

“There is an effective strategy open to architects. Whereas doctors deal with the interior organisms of man, architects deal with the exterior organisms of man. Architects might join with one another to carry on their work in laboratories as do doctors in anticipatory medicine.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure

“Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab.
It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.
So I said, call me Trimtab.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways. The metaphysical is antientropic, methodically marshalling energy. Life is antientropic. It is spontaneously inquisitive. It sorts out and endeavors to understand”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking

“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.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure

“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.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“If I ran a school, I'd give the average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers, for being good parrots. I'd give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they learned from them.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“We as economic society are going to have to pay our whole population to go to school and pay it to stay at school.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller, Education Automation: Freeing the scholar to return to his studies