Inspirational Quotes by Buckminster Fuller (American Inventor, Philosopher)

Inspirational Quotations by Buckminster Fuller (American Inventor, Philosopher)

Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) was an American inventor, engineer, architect, mathematician, poet, and cosmologist. Among the most original thinkers of the twentieth century, he was a significant contributor to scientific engineering and environmental studies.

Born in Milton, Massachusetts, Fuller was a nonconformist even at an early age. He rejected formal education at Harvard. After the death of a young daughter, Fuller blamed himself and contemplated committing suicide by jumping into Lake Michigan in Chicago. However, he was saved by an epiphany that he should devote himself entirely to the betterment of all humanity.

Fuller spent the next year without speaking to anyone as a mental discipline to focus his thoughts and toil. He worked ceaselessly on solving modern world problems using technology and invented several revolutionary designs.

Fuller also wrote about technology and went on the lecture circuit. By the 1960s, he had become a counterculture legend and a messiah of modern technology. His primary interest was housing and shelter—using the world’s resources with maximum purpose and least waste. He is best known for inventing the geodesic dome—a system of interlocking triangles that enclosed the maximum volume of space with the minimum of raw materials.

Fuller was awarded 25 U.S. patents; he wrote 28 books, received 47 honorary doctorates and numerous awards, and circled the globe fifty-seven times. Besides, he was nominated for several Nobel Prizes. His notable publications include Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) and Earth Inc. (1973.)

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Buckminster Fuller

Parents are usually more careful to bestow knowledge on their children rather than virtue, the art of speaking well rather than doing well; but their manners should be of the greatest concern.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Manners, Parenting

If I ran a school, I’d give the average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers, for being good parrots. I’d give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they learned from them.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Education, Mistakes

Love is metaphysical gravity.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Love

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Technology, Humanity

Don’t fight forces, use them.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Architecture

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.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: The Universe

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Activism, Humanity, Humankind, Future

The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Politicians, Politics

Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences – which is the mostest? which is the leastest? They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: the heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Children

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Humanity, Nature, Human Nature

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.
—Buckminster Fuller

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.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Integrity

You can never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
—Buckminster Fuller

Those who play with the devil’s toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Evil

You can never learn less; you can only learn more. The reason I know so much is because I have made so many mistakes.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Reason, Mistake, Learn

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.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Cooperation, Help

There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Experiment

The earth is like a spaceship that didn’t come with an operating manual.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Earth

Man is a self-balancing, 28-jointed adapter-base biped, and electro-chemical reduction plant, integral with the segregated stowages of special energy extracts in storage batteries, for subsequent activation of thousands of hydraulic and pneumatic pumps, with motors attached; 62,000 miles of capillaries, millions of warning signal, railroad and conveyor systems, crushers and cranes, and a universally distributed telephone system needing no service for seventy years if well managed, the whole extraordinary complex mechanism guided with exquisite precision from a turret in which are located telescopic and microscopic self-registering and recording range-finders, a spectroscope, etc. .. the turret control being closely allied with an air-conditioning intake and exhaust, and a main fuel intake.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Man, Mankind

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.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Individuality

The minute you choose to do what you really want to do it’s a different kind of life.
—Buckminster Fuller

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
—Buckminster Fuller

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?
—Buckminster Fuller

Dictators never invent their own opportunities.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Tyranny

People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Tradition

Here is God’s purpose—for God, to me, it seems, is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: God

Think globally; act locally.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Activism

You can never learn less, you can only learn more.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Learn, Learning

You can’t learn less.
—Buckminster Fuller
Topics: Learning

I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.
—Buckminster Fuller