Top 349 Quotes & Sayings by R. Buckminster Fuller

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

Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.

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

Either war is obsolete, or men are.

You can never learn less, you can only learn more.

I look for what needs to be done. After all, that's how the universe designs itself.

Gold and silver from the dead turn often into lead.

Here is God's purpose - for God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.

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.

Truth is a tendency.

Rashness is the faithful, but unhappy parent of misfortune.

Love is metaphysical gravity.

A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.

Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering.

If you are the master be sometimes blind, if you are the servant be sometimes deaf.

War is the ultimate tool of politics.

One in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a wage.

People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.

Let architects sing of aesthetics that bring Rich clients in hordes to their knees; Just give me a home, in a great circle dome Where stresses and strains are at ease.

A proverb is much matter distilled into few words.

Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't.

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

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

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

Tension is the great integrity.

Man knows so much and does so little.

Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.

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.

The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.

God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.

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.

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.

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

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

Dictators never invent their own opportunities.

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

Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

By 2000, politics will simply fade away. We will not see any political parties.

Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.

The most important thing about Spaceship Earth - an instruction book didn't come with it.

Don't fight forces, use them.

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

Tombs are the clothes of the dead and a grave is a plain suit; while an expensive monument is one with embroidery.

Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.

Parents are usually more careful to bestow knowledge on their children rather than virtue, the art of speaking well rather than doing well; but their manners should be of the greatest concern.

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.

God is a verb, not a noun.

My ideas have undergone a process of emergence by emergency. When they are needed badly enough, they are accepted.

Nature is a totally efficient, self-regenerati ng system. IF we discover the laws that govern this system and live synergistically within them, sustainability will follow and humankind will be a success.

You have to decide whether you want to make money or make sense, because the two are mutually exclusive.

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.

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.

We are going to have to find ways of organizing ourselves cooperatively,sanely, scientifically, harmonically and in regenerative spontaneity with the rest of humanity around the earth.... 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.

Mistakes are great, the more I make the smarter I get.

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.

You cannot change how someone thinks, but you can give them a tool to use which will lead them to think differently.

You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. The significance of you will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all you experience to highest advantage to others. Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.

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.

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