Top 250 R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “We are prisoners of our own metaphors, metaphorically speaking...”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

152. “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

153. “Dolphins may well be carrying information as well as functions critical to the regeneration of life upon our planet.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

155. “How much does your building weigh? A question often used to challenge architects to consider how efficiently materials were used for the space enclosed.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

156. “There are no solids. There are no things. There are only interfering and non-interfering patterns operative in pure principle, and principles are eternal.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

157. “Wealth is the product of energy times intelligence: energy turned into artifacts that advantage human life.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

160. “The impossible happens.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

161. “Whether we are able to be a complete success or failure is in such critical balance that every smallest human test of integrity every smallest moment-to-moment decision tips the scales affirmatively or negatively.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

163. “Universe is synergetic. Life is synergetic.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

164. “You never change people by fighting their existing reality.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

165. “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.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

166. “When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

168. “The one common experience of all humanity is the challenge of problems.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

169. “It is well known that of every strong woman they say she has a masculine mind.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

170. “If we design the environment properly, it will permit child and man to develop safely and to behave logically.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

171. “I’m not trying to counsel any of you to do anything really special except dare to think. And to dare to go with the truth. And to dare to really love completely.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

172. “Every child has an enormous drive to demonstrate competence.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

173. “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.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

175. “One of humanity’s prime drives is to understand and be understood. All other living creatures are designed for highly specialized tasks. Man seems unique as the comprehensive comprehender and co-ordinator of local universe affairs.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

176. “Technology paces industry, but there’s a long lag in the process.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

177. “Mind is the antithesis of reflex, and only mind could discover mind.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

178. “In order for a world-around democracy to prosper, world society must learn how to prosper.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

179. “Everyone is born a genius.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

181. “Don’t try to make me consistent. I am learning all the time.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

182. “The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

183. “We have reached the point where we are now possessed of sufficient information for each individual human to dare to exercise the option to “make it” rather than having to depend on the decisions of an educated elite.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

184. “It is new design by architects versus world revolution by political leadership.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

185. “Everything you’ve learned in school as “obvious” becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

187. “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.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

188. “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.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

189. “Dictators never invent their own opportunities.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

190. “Out of my general world-pattern-trend studies there now comes strong evidence that nothing is going to be quite so surprising and abrupt in the future history of man as the forward evolution in the educational process.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

191. “Humanity is an experimental initiative of Universe.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

194. “To expose a 4.2 Trillion dollar ripoff of the American people by the stockholders of the 1000 largest corporations over the last one-hundred years will be a tall order of business.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

195. “I must reorganize the environment of man by which then greater numbers of men can prosper.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

196. “Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

197. “For man to go from less than 1% haves to 40%, living at high standard – despite decreasing resources – cannot be explained by anything other than by doing more than less.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

198. “No man can prove upon awakening that he is the man who he thinks went to bed the night before, or that anything that he recollects is anything other than a convincing dream.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

199. “Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller