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Buckminster Fuller

148 quotes

“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.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1005.54
“The highest of generalizations is the synergetic integration of truth and love.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1005.56
“CALL ME TRIMTAB”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Inscription on his headstone. On a ship the trimtab is a small but crucial part of a the rudder mechanism, which controls the direction of the vessel; on an aircraft it is a small adjustable tab on the trailing edge of …
“Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Synergetics Dictionary : The Mind of Buckminster Fuller (1986) by E. J. Applewhite
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure (1999), by Daniel Quinn, p. 137
“The Universe consists of non-simultaneously apprehended events.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted by Robert Anton Wilson in Maybe Logic - The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson (2003)
“Realistic thinking accrues only after mistake making, which is the cosmic wisdom's most cogent way of teaching each of us how to carry on.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In Buckminster Fuller and Answar Dil, Humans in Universe (1983), 218.
“Neither the great political or financial powers of the world nor the population in general realize that the engineering-chemical-electronic revolution now makes it possible to produce many more technical devices with ever less material. We can now take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than anybody has ever known. It does not have to be "you or me," so selfishness is unnecessary and war is obsolete. This has never been done before. Only twelve years ago technology reached the point where this could be done. Since then it has made it ever so much easier to do.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We're not just dealing in willingness. Humanity has to qualify to survive. You have to have some confidence. We're all born naked, with no external equipment and no experience. Therefore we're terribly ignorant. We're hungry and thirsty, driven to find food by trial and error. So we're designed to live by trial and error. Don't worry about making mistakes. Study your mistakes; admit them, study them, and be terribly excited about them too. If this isn't true, what is true?”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's a built-in resistance to letting humanity be a success. Each one claims that their system is the best one for coping with inadequacy. We have to make them all obsolete. We need to find within technology that there is something we can do which is capable of taking care of everybody, and to demonstrate that this is so. That's what geodesic domes are about and that's what my whole life has been about.Don't fight forces, use them.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Humanity is moving ever deeper into crisis—a crisis without precedent. First, it is a crisis brought about by cosmic evolution irrevocably intent upon completely transforming omnidisintegrated humanity from a complex of around-the-world, remotely-deployed-from-one-another, differently colored, differently credoed, differently cultured, differently communicating, and differently competing entities into a completely integrated, comprehensively interconsiderate, harmonious whole.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those whom God hath joined together let no one put asunder." To Anne Hewlett Fuller on this, our 63rd Wedding Anniversary and my 85 Birthday—July 12, 1980”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Are you spontaneously enthusiastic about everyone having everything you can have?”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What humans have spontaneously identified as good and bad — or as positive and negative — are evolutionary complementations in need of more accurate identifications.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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... It is a matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“War is obsolete. It could never have been done before. Only ten years ago... technology reached the point where it could be done. Since then the invisible technological-capability revolution has made it ever easier so to do.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry. The essence of livingry is human-life advantaging and environment controlling. With the highest aeronautical and engineering facilities of the world redirected from weaponry to livingry production, all humanity would have the option of becoming enduringly successful.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All previous revolutions have been political—in them the have-not majority has attempted revengefully to pull down the economically advantaged minority. If realized, this historically greatest design revolution will joyously elevate all humanity to unprecedented heights.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This book is written with the conviction that there are no "good" or "bad" people, no matter how offensive or eccentric to society they may seem. . . You and I didn't design people. God designed people. What I am trying to do is to discover why God included humans in Universe.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am convinced that human continuance depends entirely upon: the intuitive wisdom of each and every individual . . . the individual's integrity of speaking and acting only on the individual's own within-self-intuited and reasoned initiative . . . the individual's never joining action with others as motivated only by crowd-engendered-emotionalism, or a sense of the crowd's power to overwhelm, or in fear of holding to the course indicated by one's own intellectual convictions.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment. . . . Humanity is in 'final exam' as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The nearest each of us can come to God is by loving the truth.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate. You can deceive others, you can deceive your brain-self, but you can't deceive your mind-self — for mind deals only in the discovery of truth and the interrelationship of all truths. The cosmic laws with which mind deals are noncorruptible. Cosmic evolution is omniscient God comprehensively articulate.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Humans have always unknowingly affected all Universe by every act and thought they articulate or even consider. . . . Realistic, comprehensively responsible, omni-system-considerate, unselfish thinking on the part of humans does absolutely affect human destiny.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are no solids. There are no things. There are only interfering and noninterfering patterns operative in pure principle, and principles are eternal. Principles never contradict principles. . . .”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The synergetic integral of the totality of principles is God, whose sum-total behavior in pure principle is beyond our comprehension and is utterly mysterious to us, because as humans — in pure principle — we do not and never will know all the principles.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love is metaphysical gravity.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The effective decisions can only be made by the independently thinking and adequately informed human individuals and their telepathically intercommunicated wisdom--the wisdom of the majority of all such human individuals -- qualifying for continuance in Universe as local cosmic problem-solvers -- in love with the truth and in individually spontaneous self-commitment to absolute faith in the wisdom, integrity, and love of God, who seems to wish Earthian humans to survive.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“World Game finds that 60 percent of all the jobs in the U.S.A. are not producing any real wealth—i.e., real life support. They are in fear - underwriting industries or are checking-on-other-checkers, etc.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Pg 223. - Google Books Result https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0312174918 - 1982 - ‎History
“You have to decide whether you want to make money or make sense, because the two are mutually exclusive.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It seemed that the time would come evolutionarily when humans might have acquired enough knowledge of generalized principles to permit a graduation from class-two (entropically selfish) evolution into class-one (syntropically cooperative) evolution, thereafter making all the right moves for all the right reasons.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Politics is policy. What policy should you follow in view of the idea that there isn't enough to go around — the power of the few, or the needs of the many? Political economy is based on misassumptions...”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That's the basis of all politics: it has to be you or me, there's not enough for both of us. Survival of the fittest.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But we can do so much now, with so little, that we can take care of everybody. That's why the idea of scarcity is all wrong.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Up to now, the world of politics doesn't know that. That's why all nations are dependent on armaments, why we have the arms race.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The politicians still say that it's you or me, and that's why they go for the gun.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The young world is giving up any interest in their political system. They have decided that it is absolutely corrupt.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is so much stupid information, misinformation around. You can't really get anywhere until you get out from under all that.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science... the ways it does its calculating that approximately nobody going in at a basic level can gain any sense of the whole.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Critical Path is a way to dig yourself out from all that misinformation.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But it can hardly be read in a week. It takes some study.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Max Planck says, "The opposition never yields; they just die off." It's just a question of time. They are dying off.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The giants are the supra-national corporations. The book (Grunch of Giants) is about how evolution must cope with them.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They are not multi-national, but supra-national — above nations. They don't need any passports. They can go in and out of countries without permission from anyone.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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...”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source