Buckminster Fuller Quotes

“A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.”

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

“Either war is obsolete or men are.”

“Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.”

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

“Geniuses are just people who had good mothers.”

“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.”

“Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing – after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked.”

“I just invent. Then I wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented.”

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

“I’m not a genius. I’m just a tremendous bundle of experience.”

“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?”

“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.”

“In order to change an existing paradigm, you do not struggle to change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.”

“Man knows so much and does so little.”

“Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn’t.”

“Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.”

“Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.”

“Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.”

“People do not get out of way of things they cannot see coming towards them.”

“Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.”

“Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is quite staggering.”

“The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.”

“The minute you begin to do what you want to do, it’s a different kind of life.”

“The most important thing to teach your children is that the sun does not rise and set. It is the Earth that revolves around the sun.”

“The primary purpose for government is to be a vehicle for the rich to get their hands into our pockets.”

“The purpose of our lives is to add value to the people of this generation and those that follow.”

“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.”

“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.”

“Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.”