R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes

Geniuses are just people who had good mothers.

There are over 2 million cars standing in front of red lights with their engines going. Then we have over 2 million times approximately 100 horsepower being generated as they are idling there, so that we have something like 200 million horses jumping up and down and going nowhere. Now, we have to count that in our economy when we begin to get down to what is the efficiency of the economy.

The nearest each of us can come to God is by loving the truth.

A pattern has an integrity independent of the medium by virtue of which you have received the information that it exists.

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

Take the initiative. Go to work, and above all co-operate and don't hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the intellectual integrity governing universe.

The more we learn the more we realize how little we know.

However, if we leave the industrial machinery and their energy-distribution networks and leave them also all the people who have routine jobs operating the industrial machinery and distributing its products, and we take away from all the industrial countries all their ideologies and all the politicians and political machine workers, people would keep right on eating. Possibly getting on a little better than before.

What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.

Don't attempt to reform man. An adequately organized environment will permit humanity's original, innate capabilities to become successful.

I must reorganize the environment of man by which then greater numbers of men can prosper.

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.

Whatever humans have learned had to be learned as a consequence only of trial and error experience. Humans have learned only through mistakes.

My ideas have undergone a process of emergence by emergency. When they are needed badly enough, they are accepted.

Universe is plural at minimum sixfold.

Mistakes are great, the more I make the smarter I get.

The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear. This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation.

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.

We should stop kidding ourselves. We should let go of things that aren't true. It's always better with the truth.

A new, self-employed architect scientist is the one in all the world who may accelerate realization of a high-standard survival for all, as now completely practical within the scope of available technology.

Man is designed to be a comprehensivist .

For man to go from less than 1% haves to 40%, living at high standard - despite decreasing resources - cannot be explained by anything other than by doing more than less.

The word synergy comes from the Greek sin-ergo, meaning, to work together. It describes a mutually supportive atmosphere of trust, where each individual element works towards its own goals, and where the goals may be quite varied; nevertheless, because all elements of a synergetic system support one another, they also support the whole.

By the time you are 88 years old, you "have consumed 300 tons of food, air and water."

The most important thing to teach your children is that the sun does not rise and set. It is the Earth that revolves around the sun. Then teach them the concepts of North, South, East and West, and that they relate to where they happen to be on the planet's surface at that time. Everything else will follow.

Truth is cosmically total: synergetic. Verities are generalized principles stated in semimetaphorical terms. Verities are differentiable. But love is omniembracing, omnicoherent, and omni-inclusive, with no exceptions. Love, like synergetics, is nondifferentiable, i.e., is integral.

Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren't any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn't be here in the first place.

All children are born geniuses, and we spend the first six years of their lives degeniusing them.

We shall have to stop looking askance on trends in relation to sex merely as a reproductive capability, i.e. that it is normal to make babies. Society will have to change in its assessment of what the proclivities of humanity may be. Our viewpoints on homosexuality, for example, may have to be reconsidered and more wisely adjusted.

Technologically we now have four [seven!] billion billionaires on board Spaceship Earth who are entirely unaware of their good fortune.

Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts.

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

The World has become too dangerous for anything less than Utopia.

We have reached the point where we are now possessed of sufficient information for each individual human to dare to exercise the option to "make it" rather than having to depend on the decisions of an educated elite.

Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing…after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked

God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.

Ideas are easy to come by; reduction to practice is an arduous but inspirationally rewarding matter.

Are you spontaneously enthusiastic about everyone having everything you can have?

Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before - that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.

Humans have always unknowingly affected all Universe by every act and thought they articulate or even consider.

There is no energy crisis, only a crisis of ignorance.

It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a 'higher standard of living than any have ever known.' It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable as mandated by survival.

Either war is obsolete, or men are.

All of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth, and all the truth, and to do so promptly - right now.

For the first time in history it is now possible to take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. Only ten years ago the 'more with less' technology reached the point where this could be done. All humanity now has the option to become enduringly successful.

A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.

Everything can be linked together in some fashion, in either a physical, psychological, or symbolic manner.

All of humanity now has the option to "make it" successfully and sustainably, by virtue of our having minds, discovering principles and being able to employ these principles to do more with less.