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.
R. Buckminster FullerThere are no solids. There are no things. There are only interfering and non-interfering patterns operative in pure principle, and principles are eternal.
R. Buckminster FullerWe 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.
R. Buckminster FullerThere is enough for everyone. People think that there isn't enough, so they get as much as they can, so many people don't have enough.
R. Buckminster FullerThe procedure we are pursuing is that of true democracy. Semi-democracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws. True democracy discovers by patient experiment and unanimous acknowledgement what the laws of nature or universe may be for the physical support and metaphysical satisfaction of the human intellect's function in universe.
R. Buckminster FullerWe are most probably here for local information-gathering and local-Universe problem-solving in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe.
R. Buckminster FullerU.S. labor leaders will realize that automation can multiply man's wealth far more rapidly than it is multiplying at present and that automation will leave all men free to search and research... Realizing the direct competition with foreign industry on a straight labor basis will mean swiftly decreasing wages per hour and longer hours and decreasing buying power of the public.
R. Buckminster Fuller