R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes

Here is an educational bombshell: Take from all of today's industrial nations all their industrial machinery and all their energy-distributing networks, and leave them all their ideologies, all their political leaders, and all their political organizations, and I can tell you that within six months, two billion people will die of starvation, having gone through great pain and deprivation along the way.

One can study a caterpillar forever and never be able to predict a butterfly.

Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to "make it" economically on this planet and in the Universe. We do.

When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem.

We are prisoners of our own metaphors, metaphorically speaking.

Consisting mostly of recirculating scrapped metals, 80% of all the metals that have ever been mined are still at work.

It is one of our most exciting discoveries that local discovery leads to a complex of further discoveries.

Fire is the Sun unwinding from the tree's log.

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.

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.

You can't change the way people think, all you can do is give them a tool, the use of which will change their thinking.

We are going to have to find ways of organizing ourselves cooperatively,sanely, scientifically, harmonically and in regenerative spontaneity with the rest of humanity around the earth.... 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.

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.

In order for a world-around democracy to prosper, world society must learn how to prosper.

Bite your tongue. Get a cinder in your eye. When you feel good, you feel nothing.

You can't change anything by fighting or resisting it. You change something by making it obsolete through superior methods.

Initiative can neither be created nor delegated. It can only spring from the self-determining individual, who decides that the wisdom of others is not always better than his own.

By and large, I seem to have made more mistakes than any others of whom I know, but have learned thereby to make ever swifter acknowledgment of the errors and thereafter immediately set about to deal more effectively with the truths disclosed by the acknowledgment of erroneous assumptions.

You have to decide whether you want to make money or make sense, because the two are mutually exclusive.

It is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate.

Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space.

No man can prove upon awakening that he is the man who he thinks went to bed the night before, or that anything that he recollects is anything other than a convincing dream.

Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe.

I have spent most of my life unlearning things that were proved not to be true

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.

Television is the third parent.

If humans are not required to earn a living to be provided survival needs, many are going to want very much to be productive, but not at those tasks they did not choose to do but were forced to accept in order to earn money. Instead, humans will spontaneously take upon themselves those tasks that world society really needs to have done.

Out of my general world-pattern-trend studies there now comes strong evidence that nothing is going to be quite so surprising and abrupt in the future history of man as the forward evolution in the educational process.

The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done - that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.

Now there is one outstanding important fact regarding spaceship earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

I find man utterly unaware of what his wealth is or his fundamental capability is. He says time and again, "We can't afford it." For instance, we are saying now that we can't afford to do anything about pollution but after the costs of not doing something about pollution have multiplied many fold beyond what it would cost to correct it now, we will spend many fold what it would cost us now to correct it.

War is the ultimate tool of politics.

Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't.

I am a passenger on the spaceship Earth.

The earth is like a spaceship that didn't come with an operating manual.

. . . So I vowed to keep myself alive, but only if I would never use me again for just me - each one of us is born of two, and we really belong to each other. I vowed to do my own thinking, instead of trying to accommodate everyone else's opinion, credo's and theories. I vowed to apply my inventory of experiences to the solving of problems that affect everyone aboard planet Earth.

Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us.

Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.

The most important part about tomorrow is not the technology or the automation, but that man is going to come into entirely new relationships with his fellow men. He will retain much more in his everyday life of what we term the naïveté and idealism of the child. I think the way to see what tomorrow is going to look like is just to look at our children.

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.

You either make sense or you make money.

How do we make the world work?

You can't learn less.

Windmills installed around the world converting their direct current into alternating current and feeding the electric energy into the world network can harvest the planet Earth's prime daily energy income source-the wind--and adequately supply all the world's energy needs

Don't try to make me consistent. I am learning all the time.

You never change people by fighting their existing reality.

Each one of us has something to contribute. This really depends on each one doing their own thinking, but not following any kind of rule.

The pyramids, attached with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.