R. Buckminster Fuller quotes:

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Dictators never invent their own opportunities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.

Don't fight forces, use them.

It is essential that anyone reading this book know at the outset that the author is apolitical. I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics.

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

The procedure we are pursuing is that of true democracy. Semi-democracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws. True democracy discovers by patient experiment and unanimous acknowledgement what the laws of nature or universe may be for the physical support and metaphysical satisfaction of the human intellect's function in universe.

Here is an educational bombshell: Take from all of today's industrial nations all their industrial machinery and all their energy-distributing networks, and leave them all their ideologies, all their political leaders, and all their political organizations, and I can tell you that within six months, two billion people will die of starvation, having gone through great pain and deprivation along the way.

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.

[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.

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.

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

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.

The highest of generalizations is the synergetic integration of truth and love.

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

Gold and silver from the dead turn often into lead.

Geniuses are just people who had good mothers.

For the first time in history it is now possible to take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. Only ten years ago the 'more with less' technology reached the point where this could be done. All humanity now has the option to become enduringly successful.

Love is metaphysical gravity.

We must start with scientific fundamentals, and that means with the data of experiments and not with assumed axioms predicated only upon the misleading nature of that which only superficially seems to be obvious. It is the consensus of great scientists that science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience.

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

A new, self-employed architect scientist is the one in all the world who may accelerate realization of a high-standard survival for all, as now completely practical within the scope of available technology.

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. War is obsolete. It is a mater of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry.

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

Now there is one outstanding important fact regarding spaceship earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

For at least 2,000,000 years men have been reproducing and multiplying on a little automated spaceship called earth.

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.

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

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

Children will draw pictures with everything in them...houses and trees and people and animals...and the sun AND the moon. Grown-up says, "That's a nice picture, Honey, but you put the moon and the sun in the sky at the same time and that isn't right." But the child is right! The sun and moon are in the sky at the same time.

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.

God is a verb, not a noun.

Either war is obsolete, or men are.

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.

On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate

It is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate.

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.

Real wealth is ideas plus energy.

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

We are here as local information harvesters, local problem-solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. The fact that we get away from physical problems doesn't mean we go away from problems. The problems are really rarely physical.

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.

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

Rashness is the faithful, but unhappy parent of misfortune.

Truth is the progressive diminution of residual error.

It seems that truth is progressive approximation in which the relative fraction of our spontaneously tolerated residual error constantly diminishes.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The universe is non-simultaneously apprehended

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

...primarily the individual is going to study at home.

I would say, then, that you are faced with a future in which education is going to be number one amongst the great world industries.

We as economic society are going to have to pay our whole population to go to school and pay it to stay at school.

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.

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting.

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

When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem.

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.

I am a passenger on the spaceship Earth.

The earth is like a spaceship that didn't come with an operating manual.

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?

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.

Tension is the great integrity.

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

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

Whatever humans have learned had to be learned as a consequence only of trial and error experience. Humans have learned only through mistakes.

Controlled time is our true wealth.

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.

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.

It is one of our most exciting discoveries that local discovery leads to a complex of further discoveries. Corollary to this we find that we no sooner get a problem solved than we are overwhelmed with a multiplicity of additional problems in a most beautiful payoff of heretofore unknown, previously unrecognized, & as-yet unsolved problems.

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.

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

Dwell not too long upon sports: for as they refresh a man that is weary, so they weary a man that is refreshed.

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.

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

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

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

A proverb is much matter distilled into few words.

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

. . . So I vowed to keep myself alive, but only if I would never use me again for just me - each one of us is born of two, and we really belong to each other. I vowed to do my own thinking, instead of trying to accommodate everyone else's opinion, credo's and theories. I vowed to apply my inventory of experiences to the solving of problems that affect everyone aboard planet Earth.

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

...doing more with less.

[A]ll the categories of creatures act individually as special-case and may be linearly analyzed; retrospectively, it is discoverable that inadvertently they are all interaffecting one another synergetically as a spherical, interprecessionally regenerative, tensegrity spherical integrity. Geodesic spheres demonstrate the compressionally discontinuous--tensionally continuous integrity. Ecology is tensegrity geodesic spherical programming.

A fool with a tool still remains a fool.

A pattern has an integrity independent of the medium by virtue of which you have received the information that it exists.

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

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

Above all, I am motivated by the most mysterious drive we ever experience -that of love - I don't think there's any influence on my life that compares with love.

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

All human advances occur in the outlaw area.

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.

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.

All sports are time control demonstrations...