Top 349 Quotes & Sayings by R. Buckminster Fuller - Page 3

You can't better the world by simply talking to it. Philosophy to be effective must be mechanically applied.

We are prisoners of our own metaphors, metaphorically speaking.

Everyone has the perfect gift to give the world-and if each of us is freed up to give our unique gift, the world will be in total harmony.

There will come a time when the proper education of children, by a glorified system of spontaneous education of choice, similar to the Montessori System, will be made possible.

Brain deals exclusively with the physical, and mind exclusively with the metaphysical.

Love is omni-inclusive, progressively exquisite, understanding and compassionately attuned to other than self.

All of humanity now has the option to "make it" successfully and sustainably, by virtue of our having minds, discovering principles and being able to employ these principles to do more with less.

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. Then teach them the concepts of North, South, East and West, and that they relate to where they happen to be on the planet's surface at that time. Everything else will follow.

If you change the environment, you change the people.

War is obsolete. We are not here to fight something or tear something down; We are here to be the example of what is possible. Any sane individual will tell you that violence is ... not the way.

We are operating at an overall mechanical efficiency of only four percent... Therefore, we find that if we increase the overall mechanical efficiency to only twelve percent we can take care of everybody. That three-fold increase in the overall efficiency can only be accomplished by redesign.

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.

Humanity has the option to become successful on our planet if we reorient world production away from weaponry - from killingry to livingry. Can we convince humanity in time?

Truth is the progressive diminution of residual error.

Seeing-is-believing is a blind spot in man's vision.

Here is God's purpose - For God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper; is the articulation not the art, objective or subjective; is loving, not the abstraction "love" commanded or entreated; is knowledge dynamic, not legislative code, not proclamation law, not academic dogma, not ecclesiastic canon. Yes, God is a verb, the most active, connoting the vast harmonic reordering of the universe from unleashed chaos of energy.

"The further art advances the closer it approaches science," said Leonardo da Vinci, painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and inventor of the wheelbarrow, and other useful instruments from the speaking tube to a mechanically gyp-proof whore-house, "the further science advances the closer it approaches art."

There are no solids. There are no things. There are only interfering and non-interfering patterns operative in pure principle, and principles are eternal.

Whether we are able to be a complete success or failure is in such critical balance that every smallest human test of integrity every smallest moment-to-moment decision tips the scales affirmatively or negatively.

I have great hope for tomorrow. My hope lies in three things-truth, youth, and love.

There is no such thing as genius, some children are just less damaged than others.

I'm utterly convinced that we are all here for one another and that every experience that everyone is having is relevant. It all counts. The Universe is so extraordinarily well designed that it needs all those experiences.

The one common experience of all humanity is the challenge of problems.

Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.

Right now I am a passenger on space vehicle Earth zooming about the Sun at 60,000 miles per hour somewhere in the solar system.

Don't change the man. Change his environment.

Human beings are the only creatures on the planet that tell time and think they have to earn a living.

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.

You can never learn less; you can only learn more. The reason I know so much is because I have made so many mistakes.

You don't belong to you. You belong to the Universe and you're here to serve.

Unchallenged, opinions became respected precedent then exceptionless concepts and sometimes even civil and academically accepted social law.

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. And this is not a matter of an examination of the types of governments, nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with economic systems. It has to do with the individual. Does the individual have the courage to really go along with the truth?

The vector equilibrium is the true zero reference of the energetic mathematics. Zero pulsation in the vector equilibrium is the nearest approach we will ever know to eternity and god: the zero phase of conceptual integrity inherent in the positive and negative asymmetries that propagate the differentials of consciousness.

To expose a 4.2 Trillion dollar ripoff of the American people by the stockholders of the 1000 largest corporations over the last one-hundred years will be a tall order of business.

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.

If we do more with less, our response will be adequate to take care of everybody.

You can't change the way people think, all you can do is give them a tool, the use of which will change their thinking.

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.

The difference between mind and brain is that brain deals only with memorized, subjective, special-case experiences and objective experiments, while mind extracts and employs the generalized principles and integrates and interrelates their effective employment.

Our power is in our ability to decide.

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.

One of humanity's prime drives is to understand and be understood. All other living creatures are designed for highly specialized tasks. Man seems unique as the comprehensive comprehender and co-ordinator of local universe affairs.

The impossible happens.

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.

History's political and economic power structures have always abhorred 'idle people' as potential troublemakers. Yet nature never abhors seemingly idle trees, grass, snails, coral reefs, and clouds in the sky.

As long as one human being is hungry, the entire human race is hungry.

There are over 2 million cars standing in front of red lights with their engines going. Then we have over 2 million times approximately 100 horsepower being generated as they are idling there, so that we have something like 200 million horses jumping up and down and going nowhere. Now, we have to count that in our economy when we begin to get down to what is the efficiency of the economy.

There is something patently insane about all the typewriters sleeping with all the beautiful plumbing in the beautiful office buildings -and all the people sleeping in the slums.

The opposite of nature is impossible.

Take the initiative. Go to work, and above all co-operate and don't hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the intellectual integrity governing universe.

Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience 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.

Specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the 'expert' is fooled into accepting a slavery by making him feel that he in turn is a socially and culturally preferred-ergo, highly secure-lifelong position.

A problem adequately stated is a problem solved theoretically and immediately, and therefore subsequently to be solved, realistically.

By and large, I seem to have made more mistakes than any others of whom I know, but have learned thereby to make ever swifter acknowledgment of the errors and thereafter immediately set about to deal more effectively with the truths disclosed by the acknowledgment of erroneous assumptions.

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?

Don't attempt to reform man. An adequately organized environment will permit humanity's original, innate capabilities to become successful.

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.

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.

Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his co-ordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.

The vector equilibrium is the zero point for happenings or nonhappenings: it is the empty theater and empty circus and empty universe ready to accommodate any act and any audience.