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
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