This page lists some of the all-time best Buckminster Fuller quotes. Enjoy!
Page Contents:
- Nature & Evolution Quotes
- Mind & Thinking Quotes
- Learning & Comprehensivity Quotes
- Problem Solving & Final Exam Quotes
- God Quotes
50+ Buckminster Fuller Quotes on Nature, Mind, God, & More
Buckminster Fuller Quotes on Nature & Evolution
“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.” — Buckminster Fuller
“I’ve often heard people say, ‘I wonder what it would be like to be on board a spaceship,’ and the answer is very simple. What does it feel like? That’s all we have ever experienced. We are all astronauts.” — Buckminster Fuller
“When people say something is ‘natural’, natural is the way they found it when they checked into the picture, and this picture has been changing incredibly rapidly … I don’t have a word for ‘artificial’. I don’t have a word ‘unnatural’. I say, if nature permits it, it is natural; if nature doesn’t permit it, you can’t do it. You may not be familiar with the fact that nature allows that, but your unfamiliarity doesn’t make it unnatural.” — Buckminster Fuller
“I only was able to do what I did because it was of the times. Things had to be ripe. Nature has a gestation rate.” — Buckminster Fuller
“If you did what nature wanted done, you would find yourself getting on instead of doing what the system said you ought to do.” — Buckminster Fuller
“I’m only a manifest of what evolution is up to.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Evolution is at work. You and I didn’t invent that universe, we didn’t invent that planet, we didn’t invent those laws. There’s something much bigger operating. The thing to do is to stand off and try to see what those are.” — Buckminster Fuller
“I’m so overwhelmed by the designing competence of universe that can design a human being, where you and I don’t have the slightest idea how to design ourselves.” — Buckminster Fuller
“People do not have to be machines. They’ve been the machinery … muscle machines. And evolution is trying to graduate man from that.” — Buckminster Fuller
“The universe is getting along pretty well, and we may be able to check in, we may become members of an operating system where we begin to really consciously participate in employing our higher faculties to really get on with universe.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Evolution is trying very hard to make all humanity one family, giving up all nations … What’s going on is a swift integration in a myriad ways of all humanity—not into united nations, but into united-space-planet people.” — Buckminster Fuller
“This is the essence of human evolution upon Spaceship Earth. If the present planting of humanity upon Spaceship Earth cannot comprehend this inexorable process and discipline itself to serve exclusively that function of metaphysical mastering of the physical it will be discontinued, and its potential mission in universe will be carried on by the metaphysically endowed capabilities of other beings on other spaceship planets of universe.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Evolution is apparently intent that man fulfill a much greater destiny than that of being a simple muscle and reflex machine—a slave automaton—automation displaces the automatons. Evolution consists of many great revolutionary events taking place quite independently of man’s consciously attempting to bring them about. Man is very vain; he likes to feel that he is responsible for all the favorable things that happen, and he is innocent of all the unfavorable happenings. But all the larger evolutionary patternings seeming favorable or unfavorable to man’s conditioned reflexing are transpiring transcendentally to any of man’s conscious planning or contriving. To disclose to you your own vanity of reflexing, I remind you quickly that none of you is consciously routing the fish and potato you ate for lunch into this and that specific gland to make hair, skin, or anything like that. None of you are aware of how you came to grow from 7 pounds to 70 pounds and then to 170 pounds, and so forth. All of this is automated, and always has been. There is a great deal that is automated regarding our total salvation on Earth, and I would like to get in that frame of mind right now in order to be useful in the short time we have.” — Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller Quotes on Mind & Thinking
“All humans were born naked, absolutely helpless, ignorant. We had to find our way by trial and error gradually to discover that that we have mind, and that mind can discover principles.” — Buckminster Fuller
“The most poetical experiences of my life have been those moments of conceptual comprehension of a few of the extraordinary generalized principles and their complex interactions that are apparently employed in the governance of universal evolution.” — Buckminster Fuller
“We’re here for some very important reason in the universe … We’re here with these beautiful minds, that’s what we’re here for … I was coming into a picture of man on board of our planet after millions of years, having this beautiful vocabulary so you and I can communicate these experiences, that out of those experiences we can discover principles, and we’re here to employ those principles quite clearly in the universe.” — Buckminster Fuller
“We are here for some very special reason being giving access to some of the great principles of design of the universe itself … We are here clearly for our minds—our capability to discover principles operating in the universe … Human beings have this capability no other phenomena has of access to principles of the universe by which it is designed. We must be here for something very, very important … Dare to go along with the truth mind discovers.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Mind discovers relationships … Human minds have the capability from time to time to discover relationships existing in the universe … Human mind has gradually been pulling the curtain aside and discovering some of the great design of the universe itself.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Mind, and mind alone, which human beings have that no other phenomenon we know in the universe has … has access to some eternal principles operating in the universe … None of them have ever been found to contradict … They’re all interaccommodative.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Mind, and mind alone, has been able to discover relationships that exist in between that are not of any of the special case phenomena … Brains deal in special case and mind is dealing in discovering relationships existing in between. This then comes to the word ‘synergy’. Synergy means: behaviors of whole systems—and a minimum system would be two—unpredicted by behavior of any of the parts of the system, when the parts are considered separately, one from the other … Synergy is to energy as integration is to differentiation. Energy is differentiating out, and synergy is integrating.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Mind extracts and employs the generalized principles and integrates and interrelates their effective employment.” — Buckminster Fuller
“All of humanity now has the option to ‘make it’ successfully and sustainably, by virtue of our having minds, discovering principles and being able to employ these principles to do more with less.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Each one of us has then an increasing intuition and an obligation to employ these principles in an effective manner on behalf of all humanity, and on behalf of the total integrity of universe itself in its eternal regeneration.” — Buckminster Fuller
“This is the first generation saying, ‘I’m going to do my own thinking.’ This is a great change because if we do survive it’s because man is using his mind, is doing his own thinking, and not leaving it to somebody else.” — Buckminster Fuller
“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.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Life begins with awareness … What is it that I’m conscious of when I say I am thinking. I’m now going to come down, to I said, if we try to find one word, just one word alone, that identifies our experience of the phenomena called life, I’d say the number one word would be ‘awareness’. And then I’d also say, no otherness, no awareness, because there has to be something to be aware of. I find this very, very fundamental. And it relates very much to the complementarity. And the otherness would be, not exactly the same. Because it would bring about a tendency to differentiate as the observer from the observed. I find it fascinating to think about awareness. I say, no otherness, there is nothing to look at, nothing to sense. So there would be no life under those circumstances.” — Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller Quotes on Learning & Comprehensivity
“Every human being is born a genius.” — Buckminster Fuller
“All humanity has always been born naked, helpless, ignorant, hungry, thirsty, curious, having to learn by trial and error … There is a strange vanity of man, and I think the vanity that he has, was essential to his being born naked and helpless, and having to make the fantastic number of mistakes he had to make in order to really learn something. And I think he would have been so disgruntled, so dismayed by the mistakes, the errors, that he would never have been able to carry on. He would just have been absolutely discouraged, so he was given this strange vanity to say, to continually sort of make himself exempt, and he was some kind of privileged, and always in. And he was able, then, quite clearly, to deceive himself a great deal.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Humans have had to make trillions of mistakes to acquire the little we have yet learned.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Every time we make an experiment, you always learn more—you can’t learn less … The know-how always increases.” — Buckminster Fuller
“The Oxford dictionary has about 100,000 words, indicating that little human beings in their trial and error have discovered over 100,000 nuances of information that were so different that they really needed their own word.” — Buckminster Fuller
“We are living in incredible mystery. The more you learn, the more you know how little you know, and the more mysterious it all is.” — Buckminster Fuller
“You don’t have to know anything to be negative; you have to know a great deal to be positive.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Dare to be naive … That’s the only way you’ll ever learn anything.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Who am I? I don’t know anything. You’ve got to learn over and over again that you’re nobody.” — Buckminster Fuller
“What we want everybody to do is to think clearly.” — Buckminster Fuller
“We have discovered that we have the inherent capability and inferentially the responsibility of making humanity comprehensively and sustainably successful.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Man is designed to be a comprehensivist.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Designer is defined as an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.” — Buckminster Fuller
“My objective has been humanity’s comprehensive welfare in the universe.” — Buckminster Fuller
“I have now the capability to say certain things because I became a comprehensive student.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Deliberately specializing man was led back unwittingly once more to reemploy his innately comprehensive capabilities.” — Buckminster Fuller
“The more we really learn about big patterns then the more comprehensive we are, and the more we learn how these patterns operate, the more we can really anticipate how we could take advantage of the principles that are operative, to bring them to the advantage of humanity. To try to make humanity a success, try to make the whole ecological system a success, to begin to participate in what apparently nature is always doing, eternally regenerating.” — Buckminster Fuller
“We are going to have to spread our wings of intellect and fly, or perish; that is, we must dare immediately to fly by the generalized principles governing universe and not by the ground rules of yesterday’s superstitious and erroneously conditioned reflexes. And as we attempt competent thinking we immediately begin to reemploy our innate drive for comprehensive understanding.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Our whole education system around the world is organized on the basis of the little child being ignorant. Assuming that the little child that’s born is going to have to be taught, in a sense it’s an empty container, waiting for information to be given to it from the grown-ups; and so the little child demonstrates time and again an interest in the whole Universe … A little child will ask the most beautiful questions about total Universe, continually embarrassing the grownups who have become very specialized and can’t answer great comprehensive questions. We find the child then, with its propensity to comprehend totally, ready to be synergetic. Humans have the proclivity to be synergetic, and yet, our education is to say, ‘Never mind, darling, about that Universe, come in here and I’m going to give you an A and B and a C, and then if you learn that well I’ll give you a D and an E and an F’. We keep adding to the parts. We do what we call building up a body of knowledge of brick on brick. And, this all both perplexed me and stimulated me into thinking about how we might somehow or other reorganize our self-education—because education is in the end a self-educating.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.” — Buckminster Fuller
“All universities have been progressively organized for ever finer specialization. Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable, and desirable. Yet in observing a little child, we find it is interested in everything and spontaneously apprehends, comprehends, and co-ordinates an ever expanding inventory of experiences. Children are enthusiastic planetarium audiences. Nothing seems to be more prominent about human life than its wanting to understand all and put everything together. One of humanity’s prime drives is to understand and be understood. All other living creatures are designed for highly specialized tasks. Man seems unique as the comprehensive comprehender and co-ordinator of local universe affairs. If the total scheme of nature required man to be a specialist she would have made him so by having him born with one eye and a microscope attached to it.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Inasmuch as the new life always manifests comprehensive propensities I would like to know why it is that we have disregarded all children’s significantly spontaneous and comprehensive curiosity and in our formal education have deliberately instituted processes leading only to narrow specialization.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the ‘expert’ is fooled into accepting his slavery by making him feel that in return he is in a socially and culturally preferred, ergo, highly secure, lifelong position … Society consisted then, as now, almost entirely of specialized slaves in education, management, science, office routines, craft, farming, pick-and-shovel labor, and their families.” — Buckminster Fuller
“This is typical of the way in which extinction occurs—through over-specialization.” — Buckminster Fuller
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in 10,000 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.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate ‘comprehensivity.'” — Buckminster Fuller
“Becoming deliberately expansive instead of contractive, we ask, ‘How do we think in terms of wholes?’ If it is true that the bigger the thinking becomes the more lastingly effective it is, we must ask, ‘How big can we think?'” — Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller Quotes on Problem Solving & Final Exam
“What is common to all lives in all history? Problems, problems, problems. We’re here for that … Our game on our planet is problem solving.” — Buckminster Fuller
“You’re going to have to find out what needs to be done. That is the design responsibility … You have to see something needs to be done that nobody else is attending to which is going to take a whole lifetime and commit yourself … I committed myself to solving problems with artifacts and not by social reforms or religious rules … I was committing myself to trying to make human beings a success … The only validation of my not doing away with myself would be to turn all my experience entirely over to others and not ever again work for me.” — Buckminster Fuller
“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you’re doing well.” — Buckminster Fuller
“We ought to be looking into what’s my experience teach me needs to be done, which if attended to properly can bring success for all humanity, and if left unattended might find all humanity in real trouble.” — Buckminster Fuller
“All the great governments, all the great religions, all the great businesses would find it devastating to their activity to have humanity a success—they’re all predicated on man being an inherent failure … We in our day are literally going to see man become a physical success in universe before it graduates into his larger function as universe man.” — Buckminster Fuller
“We were included in the universe eventually to be local-universe information gatherers, local-universe problem solvers, in support of the integrity of an eternally regenerative universe.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Humanity is now in what I call a ‘final exam’ as to whether we qualify to stay here … We are great programs of integrity of a capability to support the integrity of eternally regenerative universe, and we are here for that purpose. If we’re not in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative universe by using our faculties to gain local-universe information to solve local-universe problems, then we’re going to fail our exams.” — Buckminster Fuller
“The present evolutionary crisis of humans on planet Earth is that of a final examination for their continuance in universe. It’s not an examination of political, economic, or religious systems, but of the integrity of each and all individual humans.” — Buckminster Fuller
“You’re demonstrating what any individual really could do if they’re not overwhelmed by the system and really become completely inspired by the integrity of the greater regenerative universe itself.” — Buckminster Fuller
“What can the little individual do? Number one, the individual can dare to be absolutely truthful with himself … Man must be able to dare to think truthfully and to act accordingly without fear of losing his franchise to live … You don’t have to go out and do something big, but just have the courage to really go along with the truth as you know it … Everything rests on integrity; loving the truth … It’s never too late for the truth.” — Buckminster Fuller
“I’m positive that what you do with yourself, just the little things you do yourself, these are the things that count. To be a real trim tab, you’ve got to start with yourself, and soon you’ll feel that low pressure, and suddenly things begin to work in a beautiful way. Of course, they happen only when you’re dealing with really great integrity: You must be helping evolution.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Society has what I call ‘emergence by emergency’ … My ideas have undergone a process of emergence by emergency. When they are needed badly enough, they are accepted.” — Buckminster Fuller
“We’re going to have either a revolution of blood where everybody loses, or it’s going to be a design revolution … I am pitting a world-around, bloodless, constructive, design transformation revolution against a world-around destructive bloody revolution. The Design Science revolution can be won by all. The bloody revolution can be won by none.” — Buckminster Fuller
“We’ll come to a point when nobody’s having to earn a living anymore; it does not have to be you or me. We’re in for a new chapter of humanity in universe.” — Buckminster Fuller
“I now know with the resources we’ve already mined and the knowledge we already have, it’s highly feasible to take care of all of humanity at a higher standard of living than anybody has ever known … To do so without having anybody profit at the expense of another, so everybody can enjoy the whole earth … It is a mater of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry.” — Buckminster Fuller
“The most important thing is: how do we get all of humanity to find out what it is all about in the shortest possible time that man does have the option to make it? … To make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.” — Buckminster Fuller
“By doing more with less, instead of being able to take care of only 40% of humanity, we might be able to take care of 100% of humanity … Most importantly we have learned that from here on it is success for all or for none … If we do not comprehend and realize our potential ability to support all life forever we are cosmicly bankrupt.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Our responsibility is to enlighten and elucidate—not ask anybody to believe, but show them why it is so that there now can be enough.” — Buckminster Fuller
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” — Buckminster Fuller
“All the highest capabilities of man being focused on how do you kill; on the working assumption that there is never enough to go around for everybody, therefore there is no use in having social legislation, because there is no expenditure you can make that is ever going to take care of everybody. So they don’t try to spend it that way.” — Buckminster Fuller
“It is still assumed by humanity as self-evident that there is nowhere nearly enough life support to go around … Because of the working assumption that there is nowhere nearly enough to go around, this is why we have politics … Having discovered there really is enough to go around, I then find that politics are really now obsolete … If we dumped all the machinery and technology we have into the ocean, within six months humanity would die. If we dumped all the politicians all around the world in the ocean, everything would go along very nicely.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Science now finds there can be ample for all, but only if the sovereign fences are completely removed. The basic you-or-me-not-enough-for-both—ergo, someone-must-die—tenets of the class warfaring are extinct.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Despite our recently developed communications intimacy and popular awareness of total Earth we, too, in 1969 are as yet politically organized entirely in the terms of exclusive and utterly obsolete sovereign separateness. This ‘sovereign’—meaning top-weapons enforced—’national’ claim upon humans born in various lands leads to ever more severely specialized servitude and highly personalized identity classification. As a consequence of the slavish ‘categoryitis,’ the scientifically illogical, and as we shall see, often meaningless questions ‘Where do you live?’ ‘What are you?’ ‘What religion?’ ‘What race?’ ‘What nationality?’ are all thought of today as logical questions. By the twenty-first century it either will have become evident to humanity that these questions are absurd and anti-evolutionary or men will no longer be living on Earth.” — Buckminster Fuller
“I am progressively ceasing to own things, not on a political-schism basis … but simply on a practical basis. Possession is becoming progressively burdensome and wasteful and therefore obsolete … We don’t really own anything. We are really part of an extraordinary regenerative system, and it’s really that kind of truth that’s going to manifest.” — Buckminster Fuller
“I’m not interested in power (structures); I’m interested in total humanity … And because I’m interested only in total humanity, I don’t have ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people … You can’t get anywhere in your thinking if you impute malevolence to individuals.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Nobody’s looking out for the total spaceship earth … I like to look on the fact that, for some reason or another, humans have been invented and they’ve been put on this spaceship, and here are the resources, and this is the cumulative know-how. How do we use that know-how to take care of all the people on board in a proper manner?” — Buckminster Fuller
“We are engulfed in an invisible tidal wave which, as it draws away, will leave humanity, if it survives, cast up upon an island of universal success uncomprehending how it has all happened. But we can scientifically assume that by the twenty-first century either humanity will not be living aboard Spaceship Earth or, if approximately our present numbers as yet remain aboard, that humanity then will have recognized and organized itself to realize effectively the fact that humanity can afford to do anything it needs and wishes to do and that it cannot afford anything else. As a consequence Earth-planet-based humanity will be physically and economically successful and individually free in the most important sense. While all enjoy total Earth no human will be interfering with the other, and none will be profiting at the expense of the other. Humans will be free in the sense that 99.9% of their waking hours will be freely investable at their own discretion. They will be free in the sense that they will not struggle for survival on a ‘you’ or ‘me’ basis, and will therefore be able to trust one another and be free to co-operate in spontaneous and logical ways.” — Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller Quotes on God
“By ‘real God’ I don’t mean a person, but I mean the great intellectual integrity governing all the great designing.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Since all the cosmic scale inventing and designing is accomplishable only by intellect, and it’s not the intellect of humans, it’s obviously that of the eternal intellectual integrity we call ‘God.’” — Buckminster Fuller
“The greatest mistake we have ever made is to assume that the supreme authority over life and universe is not God but is either like organized religions or the humanly constituted most powerful socioeconomic systems leaders.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Without God, the little individual human could do nothing. However, in addition to brains, God gave humans mind. Human mind alone has been given access to some of the eternal laws governing physical and metaphysical universe.” — Buckminster Fuller
“It is clearly evidence that God must have included humans in the design of universe for very important reasons else we would not have been given exclusive objective use access to some of the eternal laws governing the physical and metaphysical universe.” — Buckminster Fuller
“Try to understand what God is doing; try to look at it evolutionarily.” — Buckminster Fuller
“I’m convinced that whatever I am, I’m not the physical me … Life is not the physical, therefore we’re all inherently immortal.” — Buckminster Fuller
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