Quotes by R. Buckminster Fuller

...primarily the individual is going to study at home.

I would say, then, that you are faced with a future in which education is going to be number one amongst the great world industries.

We as economic society are going to have to pay our whole population to go to school and pay it to stay at school.

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And theres a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab.Its a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks its going right by you, that its left you altogether. But if youre doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.So I said, call me Trimtab.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

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

We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief. Advancing science has now discovered that all the known cases of biological extinction have been caused by overspecialization, whose concentration of only selected genes sacrifices general adaptability. Thus the specialist’s brief for pinpointing brevity is dubious. In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which in turn leads to war.

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.

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

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?

There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what youre doing well.

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

If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, dont bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.

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 dont tell people I can get you across the ocean with my ship unless I know what Im talking about.

The universe is non-simultaneously apprehended

The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy

The minute you begin to do what you really want to do, its really a different kind of life.

Most importantly we have learned that from here on it is success for all or none, for it is experimentally proven by physics that unity is plural and at minimum two - the complementary but not mirror-imaged proton and neutron. You and I are inherently different and complimentary. Together we average as zero - that is, as eternity.

Pollution is nothing but resources were not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because weve been ignorant of their value.

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.