R Buckminster Fuller Quotes

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.

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

Love is omni-inclusive, progressively exquisite, understanding and compassionately attuned to other than self.

There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.

We are powerfully imprisoned by the terms in which we have been conducted to think.

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

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

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.

The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy

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.

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.

Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices.

Humanity is an experimental initiative of Universe.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - R. Buckminster Fuller

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

Wealth is a person’s ability to survive a certain number of days forward.

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab. It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, call me Trimtab.

Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.

If you ignorantly believe there’s not enough life support available on planet Earth for all humanity, then survival only of the fittest seems self-flatteringly to warrant magna-selfishness. However, it is due only to humans’ born state of ignorance and the 99.99-percent invisibility of technological capabilities that they do not recognize the vast abundance of resources available to support all humanity at an omni-high standard of living.

We are prisoners of our own metaphors, metaphorically speaking.

As eminent scientist R Buckminster Fuller stated: We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply in terms in which we have been conditioned to think His words are echoed by Dr Michael Ellner: Just look at us. Everything is backwards. Everything is upside-down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information, and religion destroys spirituality

They experience new-born hope that humans have indeed a destiny of individual significance complementary to the integrity of other individuals.

Because the armored knight required many helping hands to mount him and maintain his horses and arms, he had to have their goodwill and support lest his helpers overwhelm him when dismounted and encased in his armor.

The world is big but it is comprehensible," says R. Buckminster Fuller. But it seems to me that the world is not nearly big enough and that any portion of its surface, left unpaved and alive, is infinitely rich in details and relationships, in wonder, beauty, mystery comprehensible only in part. The very existence of existence is itself suggestive of the unknown - not a problem, but a mystery. We will never get to the bottom of it, never know the whole of even so small and trivial and useless and precious a place as Aravaipa. Therein lies our redemption.

Neither the great political and financial power structures of the world, nor the specialization-blinded professionals, nor the population in general realize that...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. War is obsolete.4 -R. Buckminster Fuller

Cooperen por encima de todo y no se impidan avanzar entre sí ni traten de ganar a costa de alguien más. Cualquier éxito disparejo, será pasajero.

When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” — R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.” R. Buckminster-Fuller (1895–1983)

Fuimos llamados para ser los arquitectos del futuro, no sus víctimas.

The comprehensive fact, however, is that nothing in Universe touches anything else. There are no solids. There are, in fact, no things. There are only complex critical-proximity and frequency, unique event aggregates interoperative in pure principle.

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.

Arthur Loeb in his introduction to Space Structures: "Space is not a passive vacuum, but has properties that impose powerful constraints on any structure that inhabits it. These constraints are independent of specific interactive forces, hence geometrical in nature.

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. — R. Buckminster Fuller

There is no such thing as a straight line, the sun does not go down, and it is time we updated our language. A more mesmerizing discourse I have never heard.

and of eminent scientist R Buckminster Fuller, who put it this way: You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete There is profound wisdom in Fuller’s advice. However, a new model will not come into view until men clean their inner houses. Once the inner republic is hygienic and free of disorder, the answers to external pestilence will be revealed. In the meantime man can waste his time with political reforms. That is as good as moving the furniture around on the Titanic.

I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.

We should have heeded the advice of Albert Einstein who said: Problems cannot be solved with the same level of intelligence that created them and of eminent scientist R Buckminster Fuller, who put it this way: You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete

If the total scheme of nature required man to be a specialist she would have made him so by having him born with one eye and a microscope attached to it.

unity is plural and at minimum two

R. Buckminster Fuller illustrates the metaprogramming circuit, in his lectures, by pointing out that we feel puny in comparison to the size of the universe, but only our bodies (hardware) are puny. Our minds, he says — by which he means our software — contain the universe, by the act of comprehending it.

This is why Fuller's definition depends upon consciousness. Our awareness of energy events defines their existence; we cannot go beyond the limits set by our understanding.

overlapping"—like generations. My lifetime overlaps my grandmother's and hers overlaps the life of her grandmother, but I was born long after the death of both my great- and great-great-grandmothers. Such are the events of Universe; every experience overlaps some but not all other experiences.

301.10 Universe is the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences.

Now we do not flinch to hear men and women referred to as “units” as if they were as uniform and interchangeable as machine parts. It is common, and considered acceptable, to refer to the mind as a computer: one’s thoughts are “inputs”; other people’s responses are “feedback.” And the body is thought of as a machine; it is said, for instance, to use food as “fuel”; and the best workers and athletes are praised by being compared to machines. Work is judged almost exclusively now by its “efficiency,” which, as used, is a mechanical standard, or by its profitability, which is our only trusted index of mechanical efficiency. One’s country is no longer loved familially and intimately as a “motherland,” but rather priced according to its “productivity” of “raw materials” and “natural resources” —valued, that is, strictly according to its ability to keep the machines running. And recently R. Buckminster Fuller asserted that “the universe physically is itself the most incredible technology”—the necessary implication being that God is not father, shepherd, or bridegroom, but a mechanic, operating by principles which, according to Fuller, “can only be expressed mathematically.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. —R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER