Top 250 R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

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 War is obsolete.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

204. “Universe is the aggregate of all humanity’s consciously apprehended and communicated nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

205. “There is something patently insane about all the typewriters sleeping with all the beautiful plumbing in the beautiful office buildings -and all the people sleeping in the slums.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

206. “Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

207. “Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

208. “Human beings were given a left foot and a right foot to make a mistake first to the left, then to the right, left again and repeat.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

210. “There is room enough indoors in New York City for the whole 1963 world’s population to enter, with room enough inside for all hands to dance the twist in average nightclub proximity.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

211. “Rashness is the faithful, but unhappy parent of misfortune.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

212. “Tombs are the clothes of the dead and a grave is a plain suit; while an expensive monument is one with embroidery.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

213. “I’m utterly convinced that we are all here for one another and that every experience that everyone is having is relevant. It all counts. The Universe is so extraordinarily well designed that it needs all those experiences.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

214. “The assumption is that the inevitability of a solution’s realization is inherent in the interaction of human intellect and the constantly transformative evolution of physical universe.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

215. “If man chooses oblivion, he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders. If he chooses Utopia, he must initiate an enormous education program – immediately, if not sooner.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

216. “My ideas have undergone a process of emergence by emergency. When they are needed badly enough, they are accepted.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

217. “Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

218. “A pattern has an integrity independent of the medium by virtue of which you have received the information that it exists.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

219. “We will always have war until there is enough of every essential to support all lives everywhere around earth.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

220. “I am not optimistic or pessimistic. I feel that optimism and pessimism are very unbalanced. I am a very hard engineer. I am a mechanic. I am a sailor. I am an air pilot. I don’t tell people I can get you across the ocean with my ship unless I know what I’m talking about.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

221. “You can’t better the world by simply talking to it. Philosophy to be effective must be mechanically applied.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

222. “If you ignorantly believe there’s not enough life support available on planet Earth for all humanity, then survival only of the fittest seems self-flatteringly to warrant magna-selfishness. However, it is due only to humans’ born state of ignorance and the 99.99-percent invisibility of technological capabilities that they do not recognize the vast abundance of resources available to support all humanity at an omni-high standard of living.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

223. “Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

224. “I look for what needs to be done. After all, that’s how the universe designs itself.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

225. “We should stop kidding ourselves. We should let go of things that aren’t true. It’s always better with the truth.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

226. “It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

227. “Only our minds are able to discover the generalized principles operating without exception in each and every special-experience case which if detected and mastered will give knowledgeable advantage in all instances.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

229. “The question of integrity will get finer and finer and more delicate and more beautiful.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

230. “There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you’re doing well.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

231. “Gold and silver from the dead turn often into lead.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

232. “It is essential to release humanity from the false fixations of yesterday which seem now to bind it to a rationale of action leading only to extinction.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

233. “Man knows so much and does so little.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

235. “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.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

236. “I say that radiation is inherently disintegrative: it comes apart. Gravity is inherently integrative: it pulls together. And to me, there’s a good possibility that love is what I’d call metaphysical gravity. It really holds everything together.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

238. “Relativity is inherently convergent, though convergent toward a plurality of centers of abstract truths.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

239. “Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to “make it” economically on this planet and in the Universe. We do.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

240. “War is the ultimate tool of politics.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

241. “Everything can be linked together in some fashion, in either a physical, psychological, or symbolic manner.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

242. “All sports are time control demonstrations...”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

243. “Human beings are the only creatures on the planet that tell time and think they have to earn a living.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

244. “Science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

245. “History’s political and economic power structures have always abhorred ‘idle people’ as potential troublemakers. Yet nature never abhors seemingly idle trees, grass, snails, coral reefs, and clouds in the sky.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

246. “With our minds alone we can discover those principles we need to employ to convert all humanity to success in a new, harmonious relationship with the universe.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

247. “It is essential that anyone reading this book know at the outset that the author is apolitical. I was convinced in 1927 that humanity’s most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— R. Buckminster Fuller

249. “Humans have always unknowingly affected all Universe by every act and thought they articulate or even consider.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

250. “A proverb is much matter distilled into few words.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller