Buckminster Fuller Quotes

We are prisoners of our own metaphors, metaphorically speaking.

Get ready the greatest new educational facility at the approximate dynamic population center of the North American continent

Because the armored knight required many helping hands to mount him and maintain his horses and arms, he had to have their goodwill and support lest his helpers overwhelm him when dismounted and encased in his armor.

They experience new-born hope that humans have indeed a destiny of individual significance complementary to the integrity of other individuals.

Cooperen por encima de todo y no se impidan avanzar entre sí ni traten de ganar a costa de alguien más. Cualquier éxito disparejo, será pasajero.

Fuimos llamados para ser los arquitectos del futuro, no sus víctimas.

The comprehensive fact, however, is that nothing in Universe touches anything else.
There are no solids. There are, in fact, no things. There are only complex critical-proximity and frequency, unique event aggregates interoperative in pure principle.

I am certain that none of the world’s problems-which we are all perforce thinking about today-have any hope of solution except through all of world around society’s individuals becoming thoroughly and comprehensively self-educated. Only thereby will society be able to identify, and inter-communicate the vital problems of total world society. Only thereafter may humanity sort out and put those problems into order of importance for solution in respect to the most fundamental principles governing man’s survival and enjoyment of life on Earth.

Every child has an enormous drive to demonstrate competence. If humans are not required to earn a living to be provided survival needs, many are going to want very much to be productive, but not at those tasks they did not choose to do but were forced to accept in order to earn money. Instead, humans will spontaneously take upon themselves those tasks that world society really needs to have done.

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.

We must progress to the stage of doing all the right things for all the right reasons instead of doing all the right things for all the wrong reasons.

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. Nature's long-term design intervenes to circumvent the shortsightedness of human individuals, corporations, and nations competing for a share of the economic pie. Fundamentally, political economists misassume an inadequacy of life support to exist on our planet. Humanity therefore competes militarily to see which political system... is fittest to survive. In slavish observance of this misassumption, humans devote their most costly efforts and resources to "killingry" — a vast arsenal of weapons skillfully designed to kill ever more people at ever-greater distances in ever-shorter periods of time while employing ever-fewer pounds of material, ergs of energy, and seconds of time per killing.

The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear. This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation. Caught up in a plethora of conditioned reflexes and driven by the human ego, both warden and prisoner attempt meagerly to compete with God. All are intractably skeptical of what they do not understand. We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.

Integrity of the individual is what we're being judged for and if we are not passing that examination, we don't really have the guts, we'll blow ourselves up. It will be all over. I think it's all the difference in the world.

I have to say, I think that we are in some kind of final examination as to whether human beings now, with this capability to acquire information and to communicate, whether we're really qualified to take on the responsibility we're designed to be entrusted with. And this is not a matter of an examination of the types of governments, nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with economic systems. It has to do with the individual. Does the individual have the courage to really go along with the truth?