Top 349 Quotes & Sayings by R. Buckminster Fuller - Page 2

The World has become too dangerous for anything less than Utopia.

You cannot question an assumption you do not know you have made.

When individuals join in a cooperative venture, the power generated far exceeds what they could have accomplished acting individually.

We were deliberately designed to learn only by trial and error. We're brought up, unfortunately, to think that nobody should make mistakes. Most children get de-geniused by the love and fear of their parents - that they might make a mistake. But all my advances were made by mistakes. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't.

Integrity is the courage and self-discipline to cooperate and initiate according to the Divine, which you know in your heart as Truth.

Ignorance and greed are part of the evolutionary process, which is just to say that mistakes are part of learning. There is nothing bad about behaviors or perceptions that do not work; they simply have to be given up and replaced by behaviors or perceptions that do work.

The wave is not the water. The water merely told us about the wave moving by.

We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.

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.

[My vision is] To make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.

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 continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.

None of the world's problems will have a solution until the world's individuals become thoroughly self-educated.

Real wealth is ideas plus energy.

A problem adequately stated is a problem well on its way to being solved.

You can't change anything by fighting or resisting it. You change something by making it obsolete through superior methods.

I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.

The minute you begin to do what you really want to do, it's really a different kind of life.

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.

Sharing is having more.

It is not for me to change you. The question is, how can I be of service to you without diminishing your degrees of freedom?

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

I have spent most of my life unlearning things that were proved not to be true

Architects, if they are really to be comprehensive, must assume the enormous task of thinking in terms always disciplined to the scale of the total world pattern of needs, its resource flows, its recirculatory and regenerative processes.

The future is a choice between Utopia and oblivion.

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.

The nearest each of us can come to God is by loving the truth.

To ask a politician to lead us is to ask the tail of a dog to lead the dog.

Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before - that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.

You can rest assured that if you devote your time and attention to the highest advantage of others, the Universe will support you, always and only in the nick of time.

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.

If man chooses oblivion, he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders. If he chooses Utopia, he must initiate an enormous education program - immediately, if not sooner.

There is no energy crisis, only a crisis of ignorance.

Don't try to make me consistent. I am learning all the time.

We find all the no-life-support-wealth-producing people going to their 1980s jobs in their cars and buses, spending trillions of dollars' worth of petroleum daily to get to their no-wealth-producing jobs. It doesn't take a computer to tell you that it will save both Universe and humanity trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely to stay at home.

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.

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.

There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes.

Humanity is now experiencing history's most difficult evolutionary transformation.

The purpose of our lives is to add value to the people of this generation and those that follow.

To do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.

If humans are not required to earn a living to be provided survival needs, many are going to want very much to be productive, but not at those tasks they did not choose to do but were forced to accept in order to earn money. Instead, humans will spontaneously take upon themselves those tasks that world society really needs to have done.

You never change people by fighting their existing reality.

All children are born geniuses; 9,999 out of every 10,000 are swiftly, inadvertently degeniusized by grownups.

Either man is obsolete or war is. War is the ultimate tool of politics. Political leaders look out only for their own side. Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers.

People never leave a sinking ship until they see the lights of another ship approaching.

The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear. This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation. Caught up in a plethora of conditioned reflexes and driven by the human ego, both warden and prisoner attempt meagerly to compete with God. All are intractably skeptical of what they do not understand. We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.

The word synergy comes from the Greek sin-ergo, meaning, to work together. It describes a mutually supportive atmosphere of trust, where each individual element works towards its own goals, and where the goals may be quite varied; nevertheless, because all elements of a synergetic system support one another, they also support the whole.

Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing…after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked

There is enough for everyone. People think that there isn't enough, so they get as much as they can, so many people don't have enough.

Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.

... reform the environment and not man; being absolutely confident that if you give man the right environment, he will behave favorably.

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.

I find man utterly unaware of what his wealth is or his fundamental capability is. He says time and again, "We can't afford it." For instance, we are saying now that we can't afford to do anything about pollution but after the costs of not doing something about pollution have multiplied many fold beyond what it would cost to correct it now, we will spend many fold what it would cost us now to correct it.

We should stop kidding ourselves. We should let go of things that aren't true. It's always better with the truth.

Our beds are empty two-thirds of the time. Our living rooms are empty seven-eighths of the time. Our office buildings are empty one-half of the time. It's time we gave this some thought.

Everything we see is inside our own heads.

Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts.

All human advances occur in the outlaw area.

There is only one revolution tolerable to all men, all societies, all political systems: Revolution by design and invention.

Geniuses are just people who had good mothers.