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.
R. Buckminster FullerWe speak erroneously of "artificial" materials, "synthetics", and so forth. The basis for this erroneous terminology is the notion that Nature has made certain things which we call natural, and everything else is "man-made", ergo artificial. But what one learns in chemistry is that Nature wrote all the rules of structuring; man does not invent chemical structuring rules; he only discovers the rules. All the chemist can do is find out what Nature permits, and any substances that are thus developed or discovered are inherently natural. It is very important to remember that.
R. Buckminster FullerWhat humans have spontaneously identified as good and bad - or as positive and negative - are evolutionary complementations in need of more accurate identifications.
R. Buckminster FullerWe must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.
R. Buckminster FullerWe 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.... In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding.
R. Buckminster FullerIt is one of our most exciting discoveries that local discovery leads to a complex of further discoveries. Corollary to this we find that we no sooner get a problem solved than we are overwhelmed with a multiplicity of additional problems in a most beautiful payoff of heretofore unknown, previously unrecognized, & as-yet unsolved problems.
R. Buckminster Fuller