Buckminster Fuller Quotes

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

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

The best way to predict the future is to design it.

I am a passenger on Spaceship Earth.

The most important thing about Spaceship Earth – an instruction book didn’t come with it.

When I am 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.

There is no energy crisis, only a crisis of ignorance.

It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It is a matter of converting our high technology from weaponry to livingry.

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.

Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.

You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe.

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.

You have within you right now, everything you need to deal with whatever the world can throw at you.

My goal is to simplify complexity.

Dare to be naïve.

You can never learn less. You can only learn more.

Love is metaphysical gravity.

The end moves the object. The end point is always the concept.

The sooner you begin to think in terms of systems, the more effective your thinking will be.

Universe is not about being mortal; it is about doing.

You have to decide whether you want to make money or make sense because the two are mutually exclusive.

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.

Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.

God is a verb, not a noun.

It is the responsibility of every human being to become a master of time, not a slave to it.

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

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

Nature can disregard political boundaries. Why cannot design transcend the same boundaries?

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.

Truth is a tendency.

Our power is our ability to decide.

I’m not a genius. I’m just a tremendous bundle of experience.

Rearrange the pieces until order appears.

The things to do are the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done.

We must becomeprotagenic, not symbolic imprisoned in a dangerously evasive-try-to-sidestep-it here-and-there between-animal-and-angel-archaistic passive-forget-it-all and-retreat-into-ignominious-insanity-sensual/self-snuffouts.

There is nothing in physics that says that clouds have to be white.

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.

In order to change an existing paradigm, you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.

Man knows so much and does so little.

It’s easier to change the mind than the material.

We must do away with all newspapers – columns of socalled-comment such as you write can only be gratified by dissatisfactions with the exterior lives of others.

It’s a scientific fact that if we are as energetically efficient as we could be, we could have the income from our planet divided most attractively – for everyone.

If we are 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, we must draw upon the wisdom of all the great archaic societies which equated local human experience with celestial phenomena.

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.

Pollution starts with someone not doing something.

Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.

I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job.

A caterpillar, remaining on earth, would never become a butterfly.

Somewhere there is great happiness in not getting all that one wants.

How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else!