Top 349 Quotes & Sayings by R. Buckminster Fuller - Page 6

Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete.

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.

It is well known that of every strong woman they say she has a masculine mind.

Education by choice, with its marvelous motivating psychology of desire for truth, will make life ever cleaner and happier, more rhythmical and artistic.

...doing more with less.

U.S. labor leaders will realize that automation can multiply man's wealth far more rapidly than it is multiplying at present and that automation will leave all men free to search and research... Realizing the direct competition with foreign industry on a straight labor basis will mean swiftly decreasing wages per hour and longer hours and decreasing buying power of the public.

Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences.

Universe is synergetic. Life is synergetic.

Children, as well as grown-ups, in their individual, glorified, drudgery-proof homes of Labrador, the tropics, the Orient, or where you will, to which they can pass with pleasure and expedition by means of ever-improving transportation, will be able to tune in their television and radio to the moving picture lecture of, let us say, President Lowell of Harvard; the professor of Mathematics of Oxford; of the doctor of Indian antiquities of Delhi, etc.

Universe is plural at minimum sixfold.

The Universe consists of non-simultaneously apprehended events.

Dolphins may well be carrying information as well as functions critical to the regeneration of life upon our planet.

Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space.... Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship.

The pyramids, attached with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.

Universe is the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences.

Topology is the science of fundamental pattern and structural relationships of event constellations.

Windmills installed around the world converting their direct current into alternating current and feeding the electric energy into the world network can harvest the planet Earth's prime daily energy income source-the wind--and adequately supply all the world's energy needs

I must reorganize the environment of man by which then greater numbers of men can prosper.

Fire is the Sun unwinding from the tree's log.

If we design the environment properly It will permit both child and adult to develop safely And to behave logically.

We are most probably here for local information-gathering and local-Universe problem-solving in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe.

The self-commissioned architect is the obviously exclusive potential - for as at present used, or designed, the world's resources are serving only forty-four per cent of humanity.

Never show unfinished work.

Consisting mostly of recirculating scrapped metals, 80% of all the metals that have ever been mined are still at work.

We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently inhabit taverns and have no self control.

On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate

In the United States, throughout all twenty-four hours of every day of the year - year after year - we have an average of two million automobiles standing in front of red lights with their engines going, the energy for which amounts to that generated by the full of efforts of 200 million horses being completley wasted as they jump up and down going nowhere.

Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war.

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? We may now care for each Earthian individual at a sustainable billionaire's level of affluence while living exclusively on less than 1 percent of our planet's daily energy income from our cosmically designed nuclear reactor, the Sun, optimally located 92 million safe miles away from us.

Doing the right things for the wrong reasons is typical of humanity. Precession - not conscious planning - provides a productive outcome for misguided political and military campaigns.

Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less. He may learn that what he thought was true was not true. By the elimination of a false premise, his basic capital wealth which in his given lifetime is disembarrassed of further preoccupation with considerations of how to employ a worthless time-consuming hypothesis. Freeing his time for its more effective exploratory investment is to give man increased wealth.

Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to "make it" economically on this planet and in the Universe. We do.

Does humanity have a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how?

A fool with a tool still remains a fool.

How do we make the world work?

The most important part about tomorrow is not the technology or the automation, but that man is going to come into entirely new relationships with his fellow men. He will retain much more in his everyday life of what we term the naïveté and idealism of the child. I think the way to see what tomorrow is going to look like is just to look at our children.

Each one of us has something to contribute. This really depends on each one doing their own thinking, but not following any kind of rule.

Technology paces industry, but there's a long lag in the process.

No man can prove upon awakening that he is the man who he thinks went to bed the night before, or that anything that he recollects is anything other than a convincing dream.

There is an effective strategy open to architects. Whereas doctors deal with the interior organisms of man, architects deal with the exterior organisms of man. Architects might join with one another to carry on their work in laboratories as do doctors in anticipatory medicine.

Human beings were given a left foot and a right foot to make a mistake first to the left, then to the right, left again and repeat.

Out of my general world-pattern-trend studies there now comes strong evidence that nothing is going to be quite so surprising and abrupt in the future history of man as the forward evolution in the educational process.

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

My biggest hope that we're going to make it here is that this thinking is being manifested & really employed by the young world. Will they be going fast enough to overcome the initiatives of the bureaucracies & the fears operative in those bureaucracies? It's a very touch & go question.

Pollution is merely a resource that isn't being used properly.

The question of integrity will get finer and finer and more delicate and more beautiful.

Racism, pollution and the rest of it are themselves very close to extinction.

The explicable requires the inexplicable. Experience requires the nonexperienceable. The obvious requires the mystical.

All children are born geniuses, and we spend the first six years of their lives degeniusing them.