
Section 8 : Suffering and Consolation
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)
Advertisement for his Course of Experiments in Electricity, 1751.
Section 8 : Suffering and Consolation
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)
Source: The Limits of State Action (1792), Ch. 16
“Nature is good enough and grand enough and broad enough to give us the diversity born of liberty.”
The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: I want you to understand what has been done in the world to force men to think alike. It seems to me that if there is some infinite being who wants us to think alike he would have made us alike. Why did he not do so? Why did he make your brain so that you could not by any possibility be a Methodist? Why did he make yours so that you could not be a Catholic? And why did he make the brain of another so that he is an unbeliever — why the brain of another so that he became a Mohammedan — if he wanted us all to believe alike?
After all, maybe Nature is good enough and grand enough and broad enough to give us the diversity born of liberty. Maybe, after all, it would not be best for us all to be just the same. What a stupid world, if everybody said yes to everything that everybody else might say.
The most important thing in this world is liberty. More important than food or clothes — more important than gold or houses or lands — more important than art or science — more important than all religions, is the liberty of man.
In "How Little I Know", in Saturday Review (12 Nov 1966), 152. Excerpted in Buckminster Fuller and Answar Dil, Humans in Universe (1983), 31.
"The Comprehensive Man", Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure (1963), 75-76.
1960s
Source: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977), p.5
Sweet Morality (p. 235)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)
Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. V Section I - Argumentative Reflections on Supernatural and Mysterious Revelation in General