Top 250 R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Conceptuality is subjective; realization is objective.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

102. “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.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

103. “Don’t change the man. Change his environment.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

104. “Television is the third parent.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

105. “Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn’t.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

106. “Right now I am a passenger on space vehicle Earth zooming about the Sun at 60,000 miles per hour somewhere in the solar system.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

107. “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.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

108. “The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

109. “There will come a time when the proper education of children, by a glorified system of spontaneous education of choice, similar to the Montessori System, will be made possible.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

110. “Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

111. “I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

112. “Initiative can neither be created nor delegated. It can only spring from the self-determining individual, who decides that the wisdom of others is not always better than his own.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

113. “Everything we see is inside our own heads.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

115. “Either man is obsolete or war is.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.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

116. “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.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

117. “The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

118. “We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

119. “I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

120. “If I ran a school, I’d give the average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers, for being good parrots. I’d give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they learned from them.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

121. “We are prisoners of our own metaphors, metaphorically speaking...”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

122. “The earth is like a spaceship that didn’t come with an operating manual.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

124. “We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

126. “Pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

127. “Always tell only the truth, and all the truth, and do so promptly – right now.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

128. “Observation of my life to date shows that the larger the number for whom I work, the more positively effective I become. Thus, it is obvious that if I work always and only for all humanity, I will be optimally effective.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

129. “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.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

131. “All human advances occur in the outlaw area.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

133. “Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

134. “You take the senses away, and there is no consciousness. Consciousness comes from experience.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

135. “The more for whom we strive to serve, the greater effectiveness we will have.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

136. “Specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the ‘expert’ is fooled into accepting a slavery by making him feel that he in turn is a socially and culturally preferred-ergo, highly secure-lifelong position.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

138. “Man is designed to be a comprehensivist .”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

139. “The individual can take initiatives without anybody’s permission. Only individuals can think. Only the individual disregards his fears and commits himself exclusively to reforming the human environment.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

140. “Pollution is merely a resource that isn’t being used properly.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

141. “Unchallenged, opinions became respected precedent then exceptionless concepts and sometimes even civil and academically accepted social law.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

142. “Brain deals exclusively with the physical, and mind exclusively with the metaphysical.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

144. “Ideas are easy to come by; reduction to practice is an arduous but inspirationally rewarding matter.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

146. “I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

147. “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.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

148. “The world is now too dangerous for anything less than utopia.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

149. “Universe to each must be All that is, including me. Environment in turn must be All that is, excepting me.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller