Buckminster Fuller Quotes

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.

The minute you choose to do what you really want to do,
it's a different kind of life.

All previous revolutions have been political—in them the have-not majority has attempted revengefully to pull down the economically advantaged minority. If realized, this historically greatest design revolution will joyously elevate all humanity to unprecedented heights.

I find the audiences very excited. But then they come and say to me, "Your optimism has brushed off on me. I didn't know we had an option. I feel so much better." They say, "Your optimism." And 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.

When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I've been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That's a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we're in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.

War is obsolete. It could never have been done before. Only ten years ago... technology reached the point where it could be done. Since then the invisible technological-capability revolution has made it ever easier so to do.

Some future directions and scenarios we touched upon were the possibilities of a world guaranteed annual income; the potential of fluidics as a source of energy; information and automation; the use of heat pollution from thermal electric plants to heat soil to improve crop output; the efficiency-gain by using gasoline or alcohol to run electric power plants and electricity to run cars; the production of alcohol from algae, farm wastes, or garbage and its substitution for gasoline in present-day combustion engines; the laser beam transmission of power and information; the amount of reinvestable time that will be available to mankind as a result of freeing him from the drudgery of having to earn a living (by bringing man to the bare maximum food and energy levels by the year 2000 we will have trillion more hours per year to reinvest into metaphysical regenerative functions); the increase of efficiency rates for power production and consumption, communication, transportation, etc., and the possible surplus and increase of efficiency through the stabilization of the population...

If the total scheme of nature required man to be a specialist she would have made him so by having him born with one eye and a microscope attached to it.

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.

Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers.

The housing scenario we were working on clearly showed the inadequacy of our present system. At the present rate, the use of metals in housing would prove to be totally insufficient. Engendered materials such as plastics will have to be developed if we are to solve mankind’s housing needs. The housing scenario encompassed more than just the shelter needs of the world. As it evolved we saw that it would encompass communications and mobility... As a total service facility, the housing needs would encompass not only shelter but communications-with its own resultant education, medical information and attention, personal telephone contact with anyone, anywhere, and mobility with anyone going anywhere. These would be accomplished via closed-circuit television and telephone to a world central medical, educational, and travel-routing computer system.

I am convinced that human continuance depends entirely upon: the intuitive wisdom of each and every individual . . . the individual's integrity of speaking and acting only on the individual's own within-self-intuited and reasoned initiative . . . the individual's never joining action with others as motivated only by crowd-engendered-emotionalism, or a sense of the crowd's power to overwhelm, or in fear of holding to the course indicated by one's own intellectual convictions.

How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.

Humanity is an experimental initiative of Universe.

The opposite of nature is impossible.