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Buckminster Fuller
148 quotes
“See Also: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969)”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All sports are time control demonstrations...”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is the spirit incarnate in time.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Don't fight forces, use them.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1932 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In Shelter (May 1932), 2 No. 4, 36, and (Nov 1932) No. 5, 108. Cited in Richard Buckminster Fuller, Joachim Krausse (ed.) and Claude Lichtenstein (ed.), Your Private Sky: Discourse (2001), 17; sometimes quoted or paraph…
“There is room enough indoors in New York City for the whole 1963 world's population to enter, with room enough inside for all hands to dance the twist in average nightclub proximity.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Prime Design (May 1960), later published in The Buckminster Fuller Reader (1970) edited by James Meller
“Technology paces industry, but there's a long lag in the process. Industry paces economics. It changes the tools, a great ecological change. And in that manner we come finally to everyday life. 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.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Designers and the Politicians" (1962), later published in Beyond Left & Right : Radical Thought for Our Times (1968) by Richard Kostelanetz, p. 368
“Relativity is inherently convergent, though convergent toward a plurality of centers of abstract truths. Degrees of accuracy are only degrees of refinement and magnitude in no way affects the fundamental reliability, which refers, as directional or angular sense, toward centralized truths. Truth is a relationship.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Designers and the Politicians" (1962), later published in Ideas and Integrities : A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure (1969), p. 233, and The Buckminster Fuller Reader (1970), p. 305
“God, to me, it seems is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: No More Secondhand God (1963)
“on first priority in design consideration is the full realization of individual potential in order to reach the second derivative — full realization for all individuals”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: No More Secondhand God (1963)
“The opposite of nature is impossible.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Public lecture at Columbia University (Spring 1965), quoted in "Buckminster Fuller: Thinking Out Loud" at PBS (12 December 2001)
“Nature never "fails." Nature complies with its own laws. Nature is the law. When Man lacks understanding of Nature's laws and a Man-contrived structure buckles unexpectedly, it does not fail. It only demonstrates that Man did not understand Nature's laws and behaviors. Nothing failed. Man's knowledge or estimating was inadequate.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In "How Little I Know", in Saturday Review (12 Nov 1966), 152. Excerpted in Buckminster Fuller and Answar Dil, Humans in Universe (1983), 31.
“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.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Comprehensive Man", Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure (1963), 75-76.
“Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects of Humanity (1969)
“All those who have attained high scholarly capability assure us that real education is self-education. They also say that this self-disciplining is most often inspired by great teachers who make it seem apparent that it will be excitingly worthwhile to take the trouble to bring one self to apprehend and then comprehend variously pertinent data, phenomena and derived principles. The intimate manuscript records of many great self-educated individuals show that they discern intuitively when and what it is that they want to learn... Preamble”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am certain that none of the world’s problems-which we are all perforce thinking about today-have any hope of solution except through all of world around society’s individuals becoming thoroughly and comprehensively self-educated. Only thereby will society be able to identify, and inter-communicate the vital problems of total world society. Only thereafter may humanity sort out and put those problems into order of importance for solution in respect to the most fundamental principles governing man’s survival and enjoyment of life on Earth. Preamble”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unfortunately, in the past, man has applied his vast resources and his most incisive capabilities only to the waging of great wars-, or in preparation for such warring-the space programs having been undertaken by all nations strictly on the basis of the wartime advantages to be gained by... spying and astro-ballistics”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. It is very encouraging therefore that you as representatives of the people see tit to bring us together to consider these matters”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have to ask... are you familiar with the word “synergy”?”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Synergy is to energy as integration is to differentiation. The word “synergy” means “Behavior of whole systems unpredicted by behavior of any of the systems parts.” Nature is comprehensively synergetic. Since synergy is the only word having that meaning and we have proven experimentally that it is not used by the public, we may conclude that society does not understand nature”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nature is entirely synergetic and because your problems of representing a society ignorant of such fundamentals are greatly increased you need to pay great attention to learning how to comprehend synergy and thereafter how to educate all of humanity in the shortest time how to comprehend and usefully cope with omni-synergetic universe”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After working out scenarios for satisfying what we considered the two most vital bare maximums-external electric energy and internal food supply-we evolved into some of the possible synergetic scenarios that would result from the first moves. The establishment of bare maximum levels of the above throughout the world would engender the need for bare maximums in housing, medical attention, income, communications and travel.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done — that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to "Micheal" (16 February 1970), Micheal was a 10 year old boy who had inquired in a letter as to whether Fuller was a "doer" or a "thinker".
“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.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: I Seem to Be a Verb (1970)
“I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Statement made in 1974, quoted in People magazine. In Thomas T. K. Zung, "Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for the New Millenium" (2002), 174.
“I seek through comprehensive anticipatory design science and its reductions to physical practices to reform the environment instead of trying to reform humans, being intent thereby to accomplish prototyped capabilities of doing more with less...”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Earth, Inc. (1973) This is just part of a very long sentence that covers the whole first page, but in this part of the quote, the intention of the entire book is stated.
“It seems to demonstrate that periods of industrial activity in technical syntheses of principles, data, free energy and energy as "matter," find highest employment by the fear-amassed credits of warfare. Therefore the assumption approaches fact that war promotes the major technical advances of civilization... What has not been clear is that the potential of this emergency-born technology has always accrued to human's prewar individual initiatives taken in a humble but irrepressible progression of assumptions, measurements, deductions, and codifications of pure science.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Earth, Inc. (1973) In this passage, Fuller begins to explain why technological progress seems to make great gains in war time and states his view that this is a reflection of advances mainly made in peacetime — wars sim…
“Up to the Twentieth Century, reality was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear. 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. Ninety-nine percent of all that is going to affect our tomorrows is being developed by humans using instruments and working in ranges of reality that are nonhumanly sensible.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: R. Buckminster Fuller on Education (1979), p. 130
“Dare to be naïve.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is one of our most exciting discoveries that local discovery leads to a complex of further discoveries. Corollary to this we find that we no sooner get a problem solved than we are overwhelmed with a multiplicity of additional problems in a most beautiful payoff of heretofore unknown, previously unrecognized, and as-yet unsolved problems.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Each age is characterized by its own astronomical myriads of new, special-case experiences and problems to be stored in freshly born optimum capacity human brains — which storages in turn may disclose to human minds the presence of heretofore undiscovered, unsuspectedly existent eternal generalized principles.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief. . . . In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual's leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lack of knowledge concerning all the factors and the failure to include them in our integral imposes false conclusions.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is an inherently minimum set of essential concepts and current information, cognizance of which could lead to our operating our planet Earth to the lasting satisfaction and health of all humanity.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We must start with scientific fundamentals, and that means with the data of experiments and not with assumed axioms predicated only upon the misleading nature of that which only superficially seems to be obvious. It is the consensus of great scientists that science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The word generalization in literature usually means covering too much territory too thinly to be persuasive, let alone convincing. In science, however, a generalization means a principle that has been found to hold true in every special case. ... The principle of leverage is a scientific generalization.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are now synergetically forced to conclude that all phenomena are metaphysical; wherefore, as many have long suspected — like it or not — "life is but a dream.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The wellspring of reality is the family of weightless generalized principles.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is essential to release humanity from the false fixations of yesterday, which seem now to bind it to a rationale of action leading only to extinction.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gravity is the inwardly cohering force acting integratively on all systems. Radiation is the outwardly disintegrating force acting divisively upon all systems.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Synergy means behavior of integral, aggregate, whole systems unpredicted by behaviors of any of their components or subassemblies of their components taken separately from the whole.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is nothing that a single massive sphere will or can ever do by itself that says it will both exert and yield attractively with a neighboring massive sphere and that it yields progressively: every time the distance between the two is halved, the attraction will be fourfolded. This unpredicted, only mutual behavior is synergy.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The words synergy (syn-ergy) and energy (en-ergy) are companions. Energy studies are familiar. Energy relates to differentiating out subfunctions of nature, studying objects isolated out of the whole complex of Universe—for instance, studying soil minerals without consideration of hydraulics or of plant genetics. But synergy represents the integrated behaviors instead of all the differentiated behaviors of nature's galaxy systems and galaxy of galaxies.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unity is plural and, at minimum, is two.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The explicable requires the inexplicable. Experience requires the nonexperienceable. The obvious requires the mystical. This is a powerful group of paired concepts generated by the complementarity of conceptuality.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A pattern has an integrity independent of the medium by virtue of which you have received the information that it exists. Each of the chemical elements is a pattern integrity. Each individual is a pattern integrity. The pattern integrity of the human individual is evolutionary and not static.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The eternal is omniembracing and permeative; and the temporal is linear. This opens up a very high order of generalizations of generalizations. The truth could not be more omni-important, although it is often manifestly operative only as a linear identification of a special-case experience on a specialized subject.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1005.52
“All the categories of creatures act individually as special-case and may be linearly analyzed; retrospectively, it is discoverable that inadvertently they are all interaffecting one another synergetically as a spherical, interprecessionally regenerative, tensegrity spherical integrity. Geodesic spheres demonstrate the compressionally discontinuous--tensionally continuous integrity. Ecology is tensegrity geodesic spherical programming.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1005.53