Buckminster Fuller Quotes (171 quotes, page 2)

“It is one of our most exciting discoveries that local discovery leads to a complex of further discoveries.”

Buckminster Fuller

1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), Moral of the work
Context: 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, and as-yet unsolved problems.

“I never try to tell anybody else what to do, number one. And number two, I think that's what the individual is all about. 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 that I can give out, any command.”

Buckminster Fuller

From 1980s onwards, Only Integrity is Going to Count (1983)
Context: I never try to tell anybody else what to do, number one. And number two, I think that's what the individual is all about. 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 that I can give out, any command. We're all on the frontier, we're all in a great mystery — incredibly mysterious. Each one possesses exactly what each one is working out, and what each one works out relates to their particular set of circumstances of any one day, or any one place around the world.

Thinking , Dependency

“This is not a visible revolution and it is not political.”

Buckminster Fuller

From 1980s onwards, Norie Huddle interview (1981)
Context: This is not a visible revolution and it is not political. You’re dealing with the invisible world of technology.
Politics is absolutely hopeless. That’s why everything has gone wrong. You have ninety-nine percent of the people thinking “politics,” and hollering and yelling. And that won’t get you anywhere. Hollering and yelling won’t get you across the English Channel. It won’t reach from continent to continent; you need electronics for that, and you have to know what you’re doing. Evolution has been at work doing all these things so it is now possible. Nobody has consciously been doing it. The universe is a lot bigger than you and me. We didn’t invent it. If you take all the machinery in the world and dump it in the ocean, within months more than half of all humanity will die and within another six months they’d almost all be gone; if you took all the politicians in the world, put them in a rocket, and sent them to the moon, everyone would get along fine.

“We need to find within technology that there is something we can do which is capable of taking care of everybody, and to demonstrate that this is so.”

Buckminster Fuller

From 1980s onwards, Norie Huddle interview (1981)
Context: There’s a built-in resistance to letting humanity be a success. Each one claims that their system is the best one for coping with inadequacy. We have to make them all obsolete. We need to find within technology that there is something we can do which is capable of taking care of everybody, and to demonstrate that this is so. That’s what geodesic domes are about and that’s what my whole life has been about. Don't fight forces, use them.

“While no politician or political system can ever afford to yield understandably and enthusiastically to their adversaries and opposers, all politicians can and will yield enthusiastically to the computers safe flight-controlling capabilities in bringing all of humanity in for a happy landing.”

Buckminster Fuller

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Understanding , Happiness

“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.”

Buckminster Fuller

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Failure , Thinking , Success

“Evolution consists of many great revolutionary events taking place quite independently of man's consciously attempting to bring them about. Man is very vain; he likes to feel that he is responsible for all the favorable things that happen, and he is innocent of all the unfavorable happenings. But all the larger evolutionary patternings seeming favorable or unfavorable to man's conditioned reflexing are transpiring transcendentally to any of man's conscious planning or contriving.”

Buckminster Fuller

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Feeling

“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.”

Buckminster Fuller

From 1980s onwards, Only Integrity is Going to Count (1983)

Support , Problem , Universe

“The words synergy (syn-ergy) and energy (en-ergy) are companions. Energy studies are familiar. Energy relates to differentiating out subfunctions of nature, studying objects isolated out of the whole complex of Universe—for instance, studying soil minerals without consideration of hydraulics or of plant genetics. But synergy represents the integrated behaviors instead of all the differentiated behaviors of nature's galaxy systems and galaxy of galaxies.”

Buckminster Fuller

105.00 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s01/p0100.html
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

Behavior , Nature , Study , Universe

“Unity is plural and, at minimum, is two.”

Buckminster Fuller

224.12 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s02/p2400.html#224.12
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

“All 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.”

Buckminster Fuller

1005.53 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s10/p0520.html#1005.50
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

“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.”

Buckminster Fuller

Pg. 246
From 1980s onwards, Critical Path (1981)

Knowledge , Time , Selfishness

“You may very appropriately want to ask me how we are going to resolve the ever-acceleratingly dangerous impasse of world-opposed politicians and ideological dogmas. I answer, it will be resolved by the computer.”

Buckminster Fuller

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

World

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

Buckminster Fuller

From 1980s onwards, Cosmography (1992)

“Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system's separate parts or any subassembly of the system's parts.”

Buckminster Fuller

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)
Context: Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system's separate parts or any subassembly of the system's parts. There is nothing in the chemistry of a toenail that predicts the existence of a human being.

Behavior , Parting

“There are progressive degrees of synergy, called synergy-of-synergies, which are complexes of behavior aggregates holistically unpredicted by the separate behaviors of any of their subcomplex components. Any subcomplex aggregate is only a component aggregation of an even greater event aggregation whose comprehensive behaviors are never predicted by the component aggregates alone. There is a synergetic progression in Universe—a hierarchy of total complex behaviors entirely unpredicted by their successive subcomplexes' behaviors. It is manifest that Universe is the maximum synergy-of-synergies, being utterly unpredicted by any of its parts.”

Buckminster Fuller

150.01 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s01/p5000.html
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

Behavior , Universe , Success , Parting

“Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate "comprehensivity." Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us.”

Buckminster Fuller

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Universe

“SPACESHIP EARTH: Earth is an automated Spaceship speeding rotatively at 66,000 miles per hour around the sun, which in turn, is on its own course at 6.0 kilometers per second within the Galactic Nebula. The awareness of Earth’s mobile patterning within the cosmos gives the perspective needed to deal with the overall evolutionary event-patterning aboard our spherical space-vehicle Earth, rather than the minute details. The automated events transpiring aboard Earth lend powerful advantages to those who comprehend the automation and attempt to work with it in the most long-term, humanly advantageous ways rather than ignorantly attempting to control or oppose it. Both Earth’s and humanity’s automation are biological.”

Buckminster Fuller

Source: 1960s, Presentation to U.S. Congressional Sub-Committee on World Game (1969), p. 102

Way , Sun , Speed

“The wellspring of reality is the family of weightless generalized principles.”

Buckminster Fuller

1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), The Wellspring of Reality

Family , Reality

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

Buckminster Fuller

From 1980s onwards, Grunch of Giants (1983)

History

“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.”

Buckminster Fuller

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Knowledge

“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.”

Buckminster Fuller

From 1980s onwards, Critical Path (1981)

Truth

“I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics.”

Buckminster Fuller

From 1980s onwards, Grunch of Giants (1983)

Problem

“The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways. The metaphysical is antientropic, methodically marshalling energy. Life is antientropic. It is spontaneously inquisitive. It sorts out and endeavors to understand.”

Buckminster Fuller

1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), The Wellspring of Reality

Life , Way , Understanding

“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”

Buckminster Fuller

No More Secondhand God (1963)
1960s

“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.”

Buckminster Fuller

1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), The Wellspring of Reality

Nature , Science

“There's a major pattern of energy in universe wherein the very large events, earthquakes, and so forth, occur in any one area of universe very much less frequently than do the small energy events. Around the Earth insects occur more often than do earthquakes. In the patterning of total evolutionary events, there comes a time, once in a while, amongst the myriad of low energy events, when a large energy event transpires and is so disturbing that with their general adaptability lost, the ultra-specialized creatures perish.”

Buckminster Fuller

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Universe , Time

“I do know that technologically humanity now has the opportunity, for the first time in its history, to operate our planet in such a manner as to support and accommodate all humanity at a substantially more advanced standard of living than any humans have ever experienced.”

Buckminster Fuller

From 1980s onwards, Grunch of Giants (1983)

History , Support , Time

“Einstein, Planck, and other leading scientists said, "We're going to have to reassess and redefine the physical universe." — They defined the physical universe as "an aggregate of non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping transformation events."”

Buckminster Fuller

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Universe

“We must stop burning up the house to keep the family warm. We have all the technology needed to tap vast cosmic energies of the sun but greedy big business and money drunk government won't allow it because they haven't found a way to place a meter on the sun.”

Buckminster Fuller

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Money , Family , Way , Business

“When blimp photographs are taken of giant stadia packed full of rock-concert or football fans, we get an idea of what 100,000 people look like. We all think of Hiroshima as the worst single killing of humans by humans. That was about a 75,000-capacity-coliseum-full. Each day of each year, year after year, a 75,000-capacity-stadiumfull of around-the-world humans perish from starvation or its side effects, despite an annual average 5-percent world food-production overage of the amount of food adequate for the total world's population. This daily kill of innocents dwarfs the awful Auschwitz killing.”

Buckminster Fuller

From 1980s onwards, Grunch of Giants (1983)

People , World , Food , Idea

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

Buckminster Fuller

1005.56 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s10/p0520.html#1005.50
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

Love , Truth

“All sports are time control demonstrations…”

Buckminster Fuller

1920s–1950s, 4D Timelock (1928)

Sport , Time

“The opposite of nature is impossible.”

Buckminster Fuller

Public lecture at Columbia University (Spring 1965), quoted in "Buckminster Fuller: Thinking Out Loud" at PBS (12 December 2001) http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/r-buckminster-fuller-about-r-buckminster-fuller/599/
1960s

Nature

“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.”

Buckminster Fuller

1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), The Wellspring of Reality

Education , Behavior

“Realistic thinking accrues only after mistake making, which is the cosmic wisdom's most cogent way of teaching each of us how to carry on.”

Buckminster Fuller

In Buckminster Fuller and Answar Dil, Humans in Universe (1983), 218.
From 1980s onwards

Wisdom , Way , Thinking

“Universe is synergetic. Life is synergetic.”

Buckminster Fuller

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Life , Universe

“I find people only listen to you when they ask you to talk to them.”

Buckminster Fuller

From 1980s onwards, Only Integrity is Going to Count (1983)

People

“There is an inherently minimum set of essential concepts and current information, cognizance of which could lead to our operating our planet Earth to the lasting satisfaction and health of all humanity.”

Buckminster Fuller

1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), The Wellspring of Reality

Health

“Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.”

Buckminster Fuller

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Books

“Our school systems are all nonsynergetic. We take the whole child and fractionate the scope of his or her comprehending coordination by putting the children in elementary schools—to become preoccupied with elements or isolated facts only. Thereafter we force them to choose some specialization, forcing them to forget the whole. … We may well ask how it happened that the entire scheme of advanced education is devoted exclusively to ever narrower specialization. We find that the historical beginnings of schools and tutoring were established, and economically supported by illiterate and vastly ambitious warlords who required a wide variety of brain slaves with which to logistically and ballistically overwhelm those who opposed their expansion of physical conquest. They also simultaneously DIVIDED and CONQUERED any and all "bright ones" who might otherwise rise within their realms to threaten their supremacy. The warlord vitiated their threat by making them all specialists and reserving to himself exclusively the right to think about and act comprehensively. The warlord made all those about him differentiators and reserved the function of integration to himself.”

Buckminster Fuller

Source: 1960s, Presentation to U.S. Congressional Sub-Committee on World Game (1969), p. 15

Children , Education , School , Support

“Lack of knowledge concerning all the factors and the failure to include them in our integral imposes false conclusions.”

Buckminster Fuller

1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), The Wellspring of Reality

Failure , Knowledge , Falseness

“In spite of all humans' innate interest in the interrelatedness of all experience, long ago these world-power-structure builders learned to shunt all the bright intellectuals and the physically creative into specialist careers. The powerful reserved for themselves the far easier, because innate, comprehensive functioning. All one needs to do is to discover how self-perpetuating is this disease of specialization is to witness the inter-departmental battling for educational funds and the concomitant jealous guarding of the various specializations assigned to a department's salaried experts on each subject in any university.”

Buckminster Fuller

From 1980s onwards, Cosmography (1992)

World , Education , Disease , Learning

“What humans have spontaneously identified as good and bad — or as positive and negative — are evolutionary complementations in need of more accurate identifications.”

Buckminster Fuller

From 1980s onwards, Critical Path (1981)

“Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys — legally enacted game-playing — agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and its all unwitting members.”

Buckminster Fuller

From 1980s onwards, Grunch of Giants (1983)

Game

“The explicable requires the inexplicable. Experience requires the nonexperienceable. The obvious requires the mystical. This is a powerful group of paired concepts generated by the complementarity of conceptuality.”

Buckminster Fuller

501.13 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s05/p0000.html#501.10
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

“The eternal is omniembracing and permeative; and the temporal is linear. This opens up a very high order of generalizations of generalizations. The truth could not be more omni-important, although it is often manifestly operative only as a linear identification of a special-case experience on a specialized subject.”

Buckminster Fuller

1005.52 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s10/p0520.html#1005.50
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

Truth

“I seek through comprehensive anticipatory design science and its reductions to physical practices to reform the environment instead of trying to reform humans, being intent thereby to accomplish prototyped capabilities of doing more with less…”

Buckminster Fuller

1947
Earth, Inc. (1973) ISBN 0-385-01825-8 This is just part of a very long sentence that covers the whole first page, but in this part of the quote, the intention of the entire book is stated.
1970s

Science

“"Those whom God hath joined together let no one put asunder." To Anne Hewlett Fuller on this, our 63rd Wedding Anniversary and my 85 Birthday—July 12, 1980”

Buckminster Fuller

From 1980s onwards, Critical Path (1981)

God , Birthday , Wedding

“Life is the spirit incarnate in time.”

Buckminster Fuller

1920s–1950s, 4D Timelock (1928)

Life , Time