Buckminster Fuller, one of the greatest minds in history.
"Dare to be naïve."
"Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment."
"Relativity is inherently convergent, though convergent toward a plurality of centers of abstract truths. Degrees of accuracy are only degrees of refinement and magnitude in no way affects the fundamental reliability, which refers, as directional or angular sense, toward centralized truths. Truth is a relationship."
"So long as mathematicians can impose up-and-down semantics upon students while trafficking personally in the non-up-and-down advantages of their concise statements, they can impose upon the ignorance of man a monopoly of access to accurate processing of information and can fool even themselves by thought habits governing the becoming behavior of professional specialists, by disclaiming the necessity of, or responsibility for, comprehensive adjustment of the a priori thought to total reality of universal principles. The everywhere-relative velocities and momentums of interactions, of energetic phenomena of universe, are central to the preoccupations and realizations of the comprehensive designer. The concept of relativity involves high frequency of re-established awareness, and progressively integrating consideration of the respective, and also integrated dynamic complexities of the moving and transforming frame of reference and of the integrated dynamic complexities of the observed, as well as of the series of integrated sub-dynamic complexities, in respect to each of the major categories of the relatively moving frames of reference, of the observer and the observed. It also involves constant reference of all the reciprocating sub-sets to the comprehensive totality of non-simultaneous universe, from which naught may be lost."
"God, to me, it seems
is a verb,
not a noun,
proper or improper."
"The opposite of nature is impossible."
"Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies."
"The Things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done — that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual."
"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. 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."
"I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe."
"Up to the Twentieth Century, reality was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear. Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality. Ninety-nine percent of all that is going to affect our tomorrows is being developed by humans using instruments and working in ranges of reality that are nonhumanly sensible."
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.”
“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty... but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”
“Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.”
“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.”
“Whenever I draw a circle, I immediately want to step out of it.”
“Everything you’ve learned in school as “obvious” becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.”
“Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.”
“I am convinced that creativity is a priority to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.”
“I’m not a genius. I’m just a tremendous bundle of experience.”
“In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.”
“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.”
“Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is quite staggering."
“If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.”
“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.”
“If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do… How would I be? What would I do?”
“Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren’t any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn’t be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life’s challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person. ”
“I am a passenger on the spaceship Earth.”
“Love is omni-inclusive, progressively exquisite, understanding and compassionately attuned to other than self.”
“Either war is obsolete or men are.”
“I just invent. Then I wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented.”
“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.”
“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”
“I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.”
“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.”
“We as economic society are going to have to pay our whole population to go to school and pay it to stay at school.”
“A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.”
“It is new design by architects versus world revolution by political leadership.”
“God is a verb.”
“Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.”
“Children will draw pictures with everything in them…houses and trees and people and animals…and the sun AND the moon. Grown-up says, “That’s a nice picture, Honey, but you put the moon and the sun in the sky at the same time and that isn’t right.” But the child is right! The sun and moon are in the sky at the same time.”
“Integrity is the essence of everything successful.”
“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.”
“My biggest hope that we’re going to make it here is that this thinking is being manifested and really employed by the young world. Will they be going fast enough to overcome the initiatives of the bureaucracies and the fears operative in those bureaucracies? It’s a very touch and go question.”
“It is one of our most exciting discoveries that local discovery leads to a complex of further discoveries. Corollary to this we find that we no sooner get a problem solved than we are overwhelmed with a multiplicity of additional problems in a most beautiful payoff of heretofore unknown, previously unrecognized, and as-yet unsolved problems.”
“You can never learn less; you can only learn more.”
“The minute you begin to do what you want to do, it’s a different kind of life.”
“Thou mayest as well expect to grow stronger by always eating, as wiser by always reading. Too much overcharges Nature, and turns more into disease than nourishment. ‘Tis thought and digestion which make books serviceable, and give health and vigor to the mind.”
“Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts.”
“By and large, I seem to have made more mistakes than any others of whom I know, but have learned thereby to make ever swifter acknowledgment of the errors and thereafter immediately set about to deal more effectively with the truths disclosed by the acknowledgment of erroneous assumptions.”
“Nature does have manure and she does have roots as well as blossoms, and you can’t hate the manure and blame the roots for not being blossoms.”
“Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.”
“Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.”
“How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”
“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.”
“Love is metaphysical gravity.”
“Man knows so much and does so little.”
“Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices.”
“We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.”
“Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn’t.”
“People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.”
“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.”
“A proverb is much matter distilled into few words.”
“I look for what needs to be done. After all, that’s how the universe designs itself.”
“My ideas have undergone a process of emergence by emergency. When they are needed badly enough, they are accepted.”
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