Best 265 quotes of R. Buckminster Fuller on MyQuotes

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.

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

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

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

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.

[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.

Always tell only the truth, and all the truth, and do so promptly - right now.

American labor will realize that its function is not to increase jobs, but to multiply the wealth and to expand the numbers benefited by the wealth at the swiftest possible rate.

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.

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 well on its way to being solved.

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.

Are you spontaneously enthusiastic about everyone having everything you can have?

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

At first the, only subconsciously apprehended, approaching confluences of complex events make themselves known intuitively within the intellectual weather. Then comes a gradually awakening consciousness of the presence of new families of differentiating-out challenging concepts of every day prominence. It is with these randomly patterning families of separate concepts that evolution is about to deal integratively. As a now specific unitary problem it may be disposed of effectively when and if that unified problem becomes "adequately stated" and thereby comprehensibly solvable.

Bite your tongue. Get a cinder in your eye. When you feel good, you feel nothing.

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

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

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.

By the time you are 88 years old, you "have consumed 300 tons of food, air and water.

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.

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.

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.

Conceptuality is subjective; realization is objective.

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

Controlled time is our true wealth.

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

Degrees of accuracy are only degrees of refinement and magnitude in no way affects the fundamental reliability, which refers, as directional or angular sense, toward centralized truths. Truth is a relationship.

Dictators never invent their own opportunities.

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

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.

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

Don't change the man. Change his environment.

Don't fight forces, use them.

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

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

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

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.

Either war is obsolete, or men are.

Every child has an enormous drive to demonstrate competence.

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.

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

Everyone is born a genius.

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.

Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe.

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.

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

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