Buckminster Fuller Quotes
1. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
2. There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.
3. 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.
4. 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. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life’s challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person.
5. Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing…after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked.
6. 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.
7. Everything you’ve learned in school as “obvious” becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
8. Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.
9. I’m not trying to counsel any of you to do anything really special except dare to think. And to dare to go with the truth. And to dare to really love completely.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. The minute you choose to do what you really want to do, it’s a different kind of life.
13. Geniuses are just people who had good mothers.
14. 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.
15. I’m not a genius. I’m just a tremendous bundle of experience.
16. Dare to be naive.
17. Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
18. I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.
19. Love is omni-inclusive, progressively exquisite, understanding and compassionately attuned to other than self.
20. Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is quite staggering.
21. When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I’ve been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That’s a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we’re in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.
22. 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?
23. I am a passenger on the spaceship Earth.
24. I just invent. Then I wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented.
25. Mistakes are great, the more I make the smarter I get.
26. 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.
27. Either war is obsolete or men are.
28. Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.
29. Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his co-ordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.
30. I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.
31. There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you’re doing well.
32. Pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.
33. Today’s news consists of aggregates of fragments. Anyone who has taken part in any event that has subsequently appeared in the news is aware of the gross disparity between the actual and the reported events. We also learn frequently of prefabricated and prevaricated evens of a complex nature purportedly undertaken for the purposes wither of suppressing or rigging the news, which in turn perverts humanity’s tactical information resources. All history becomes suspect. Probably our most polluted resource is the tactical information to which humanity spontaneously reflexes.
34. Specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the ‘expert’ is fooled into accepting a slavery by making him feel that he in turn is a socially and culturally preferred—ergo, highly secure—lifelong position.
35. If we dump all the machinery and take the knowledge we have in the ocean within six months humanity will die. If we dump all the politician all around the world in the ocean everything will go along very nicely.
36. God is a verb
37. Few realize that political action offers little solution to the world’s major problems. Few understand that the elite have created political parties in order to prevent real change from ever taking place. The political arena is merely the “sty” in which two or more mutually hostile agencies, created by the same hidden hand, get the chance to pummel one another. As alternative researcher Juri Lina so brilliantly put it: When the left wing Freemason is finished, the right-wing Freemason takes over The point has been emphasized by many an insider: The elementary principle of all deception is to attract the enemy’s attention to what you wish him to see and to distract his attention from what you so not wish him to see – General Sir Archibald Wavel The world’s power structures have always ‘divided to conquer’ and have always ‘kept divided to keep conquered.’ As a consequence the power structure has so divided humanity – not only into special function categories but into religious and language and color categories – that individual humans are now helplessly inarticulate in the face of the present crisis. They consider their political representation to be completely corrupted, therefore, they feel almost utterly helpless
38. Most importantly we have learned that from here on it is success for all or none, for it is experimentally proven by physics that “unity is plural and at minimum two” – the complementary but not mirror-imaged proton and neutron. You and I are inherently different and complimentary. Together we average as zero – that is, as eternity.
39. How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.
40. Integrity is the essence of everything successful.
41. 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.
42. …primarily the individual is going to study at home.
43. The universe is non-simultaneously apprehended
44. The minute you begin to do what you really want to do, it’s really a different kind of life.
45. Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less.
46. 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.
47. We as economic society are going to have to pay our whole population to go to school and pay it to stay at school.
48. 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.
49. I am not optimistic or pessimistic. I feel that optimism and pessimism are very unbalanced. I am a very hard engineer. I am a mechanic. I am a sailor. I am an air pilot. I don’t tell people I can get you across the ocean with my ship unless I know what I’m talking about.
50. The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways. The metaphysical is antientropic, methodically marshalling energy. Life is antientropic. It is spontaneously inquisitive. It sorts out and endeavors to understand
51. We are powerfully imprisoned by the terms in which we have been conducted to think.
52. 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.
53. Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality.
54. 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.
55. It is new design by architects versus world revolution by political leadership.
56. If I ran a school, I’d give the average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers, for being good parrots. I’d give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they learned from them.
57. Human beings are the only creatures on the planet that tell time and think they have to earn a living.
58. The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy.
59. Science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience.
60. We are called to be the architects of the future, not its victims.
