Quotes by Richard Buckminster Fuller

A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
A proverb is much matter distilled into few words.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
By 2000, politics will simply fade away. We will not see any political parties.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Dictators never invent their own opportunities.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Don't fight forces, use them.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Either war is obsolete, or men are.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
God is a verb, not a noun proper or improper.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Gold and silver from the dead turn often into lead.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
I look for what needs to be done. After all, that's how the universe designs itself.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.
– Richard 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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
If you are the master be sometimes blind, if you are the servant be sometimes deaf.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Integrity is the essence of everything successful.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Let architects sing of aesthetics that bring Rich clients in hordes to their knees; Just give me a home, in a great circle dome Where stresses and strains are at ease.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Love is metaphysical gravity.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Man knows so much and does so little.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
My ideas have undergone a process of emergence by emergency. When they are needed badly enough, they are accepted.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Out of my general world-pattern-trend studies there now comes strong evidence that nothing is going to be quite so surprising and abrupt in the future history of man as the forward evolution in the educational process.
– Richard 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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Rashness is the faithful, but unhappy parent of misfortune.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Tension is the great integrity.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
The pyramids, attached with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Thou mayest as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading. Too much overcharges Nature, and turns more into disease than nourishment. 'Tis thought and digestion which makes books serviceable, and give health and vigor to the mind.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
To expose a 4.2 trillion dollar ripoff of the American people by the stockholders of the 1000 largest corporations over the last one-hundred years will be a tall order of business.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Tombs are the clothes of the dead and a grave is a plain suit; while an expensive monument is one with embroidery.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Truth is a tendency.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
War is the ultimate tool of politics.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
You can never learn less, you can only learn more.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Dare to be naive.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Of course, 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.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller