R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes

...primarily the individual is going to study at home.

~ R. Buckminster 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.

~ 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.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief. Advancing science has now discovered that all the known cases of biological extinction have been caused by overspecialization, whose concentration of only selected genes sacrifices general adaptability. Thus the specialist’s brief for pinpointing brevity is dubious. In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which in turn leads to war.

~ R. 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?

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

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

~ R. 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.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

I am not optimistic or pessimistic. I feel that optimism and pessimism are very unbalanced. I am a very hard engineer. I am a mechanic. I am a sailor. I am an air pilot. I don't tell people I can get you across the ocean with my ship unless I know what I'm talking about.

~ R. 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.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

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

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Either war is obsolete, or men are.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

War is the ultimate tool of politics.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Love is metaphysical gravity.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Man knows so much and does so little.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

God is a verb, not a noun.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Truth is a tendency.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

~ R. 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.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

~ R. Buckminster Fuller