R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER QUOTES
After learning about Buckminster Fuller several decades ago… and becoming fully aware of his unique outlook…
I became an admirer of him… his focus, energy and candor.
He truly was a comprehensivist… and I humbly have adopted that moniker to describe myself.
Below are a host of his quotes covering all manner of life and our interactions here on ‘Spaceship Earth’.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
– Richard Buckminster FullerThe purpose of our lives is to add value to the people of this generation and those that follow.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
The courage to cooperate or initiate are based entirely on the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth as the divine mind within you tells you the truth is. It really does require a courage and a self-disciplining to go along with that truth.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
The minute you begin to do what you want to do, it’s a different kind of life.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
God is a verb.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
The nearest each of us can come to God is by loving the truth.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Life is the spirit incarnate in time.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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?
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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 themselves 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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
The politician is someone who deals in man’s problems of adjustment. To ask a politician to lead us is to ask the tail of a dog to lead the dog.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
The primary purpose for government is to be a vehicle for the rich to get their hands into our pockets.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
It is new design by architects versus world revolution by political leadership.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Either war is obsolete or men are.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing – after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
I look for what needs to be done. After all, that’s how the universe designs itself.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
I’m not a genius. I’m just a tremendous bundle of experience.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
A proverb is much matter distilled into few words.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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 continuum’s. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is quite staggering.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn’t.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Nature does have manure and she does have roots as well as blossoms, and you can’t hate the manure and blame the roots for not being blossoms.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Love is metaphysical gravity.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Geniuses are just people who had good mothers.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
I am convinced that creativity is a priority to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and re-experience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences – “which is the mostest? which is the leastest?” They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
I just invent. Then I wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
The explicable requires the inexplicable. Experience requires the nonexperienceable. The obvious requires the mystical.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
My ideas have undergone a process of emergence by emergency. When they are needed badly enough, they are accepted.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Man knows so much and does so little.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Children will draw pictures with everything in them… houses and trees and people and animals… and the sun AND the moon. Grown-up says, “That’s a nice picture, honey, but you put the moon and the sun in the sky at the same time and that isn’t right.” But the child IS right! The sun and moon are in the sky at the same time.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
You can never learn less; you can only learn more.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
You may very appropriately want to ask me how we are going to resolve the ever-acceleratingly dangerous impasse of world-opposed politicians and ideological dogmas. I answer, it will be resolved by the computer.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
We as economic society are going to have to pay our whole population to go to school and pay it to stay at school.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller