R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes

The individual can take initiatives without anybody's permission. Only individuals can think. Only the individual disregards his fears and commits himself exclusively to reforming the human environment.

I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.

We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.

You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. The significance of you will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all you experience to highest advantage to others. Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.

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

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

A fool with a tool still remains a fool.

All sports are time control demonstrations.

I'm utterly convinced that we are all here for one another and that every experience that everyone is having is relevant. It all counts. The Universe is so extraordinarily well designed that it needs all those experiences.

His Unique Selling Position was to make the world work for 100% of humanity. .

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? We may now care for each Earthian individual at a sustainable billionaire's level of affluence while living exclusively on less than 1 percent of our planet's daily energy income from our cosmically designed nuclear reactor, the Sun, optimally located 92 million safe miles away from us.

The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

Above all, I am motivated by the most mysterious drive we ever experience -that of love - I don't think there's any influence on my life that compares with love.

The more for whom we strive to serve, the greater effectiveness we will have.

You don't belong to you. You belong to the Universe and you're here to serve.

We 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.

For at least 2,000,000 years men have been reproducing and multiplying on a little automated spaceship called earth.

Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less.

Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate 'comprehensivity.

Controlled time is our true wealth.

Dwell not too long upon sports: for as they refresh a man that is weary, so they weary a man that is refreshed.

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.

People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.

American labor will realize that its function is not to increase jobs, but to multiply the wealth and to expand the numbers benefited by the wealth at the swiftest possible rate.

Doing the right things for the wrong reasons is typical of humanity. Precession - not conscious planning - provides a productive outcome for misguided political and military campaigns.

Always tell only the truth, and all the truth, and do so promptly - right now.

Unity is plural and, at a minimum, is two.

The Universe consists of non-simultaneously apprehended events.

Never show unfinished work.

I look for what needs to be done

Integrity is the courage and self-discipline to cooperate and initiate according to the Divine, which you know in your heart as Truth.

Gold and silver from the dead turn often into lead.

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

When individuals join in a cooperative venture, the power generated far exceeds what they could have accomplished acting individually.

A proverb is much matter distilled into few words.

Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete.

Conceptuality is subjective; realization is objective.

History's political and economic power structures have always abhorred 'idle people' as potential troublemakers. Yet nature never abhors seemingly idle trees, grass, snails, coral reefs, and clouds in the sky.

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.

That which is communicated, i.e., understood, is metaphysical. The means of communication is physical.

Whether we are able to be a complete success or failure is in such critical balance that every smallest human test of integrity every smallest moment-to-moment decision tips the scales affirmatively or negatively.

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.

I set about fifty-five years ago (1927) to see what a penniless, unknown human individual with a dependent wife and newborn child might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity

Observation of my life to date shows that the larger the number for whom I work, the more positively effective I become. Thus, it is obvious that if I work always and only for all humanity, I will be optimally effective.

I have to say, I think that we are in some kind of final examination as to whether human beings now, with this capability to acquire information and to communicate, whether we're really qualified to take on the responsibility we're designed to be entrusted with. And this is not a matter of an examination of the types of governments, nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with economic systems. It has to do with the individual. Does the individual have the courage to really go along with the truth?

There are no solids. There are no things. There are only interfering and non-interfering patterns operative in pure principle, and principles are eternal.

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.

You can never learn less; you can only learn more. The reason I know so much is because I have made so many mistakes.