Buckminster Fuller
Inventor of geodesic dome, systems thinker
Most quoted
"We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before—that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment."
— from Critical Path, 1980
"If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday's fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem."
— from Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1969
"The function of what I call design science is to solve problems by introducing into the environment new artifacts, the availability of which will induce their spontaneous employment by humans and thus, coincidentally, cause humans to abandon their previous problem-producing behaviors and devices."
— from Critical Path
All quotes by Buckminster Fuller (245)
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
God is a verb, not a noun.
There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.
We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.
Integrity is the essence of everything successful.
When I'm 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.
Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
Don't try to make a living, try to make a difference.
The most important thing to remember about Spaceship Earth is that no instruction book came with it.
Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.
Call me Trimtab.
Whether we are to be or not to be is the question of the moment.
There is no such thing as a straight line or a true plane.
Nature is a totally efficient system. Energy is never lost, it's only transformed.
The highest function of the architect is to remove the need for his own work.
Love is omni-inclusive, progressively exquisite, understanding and compassionately attuned to the totality of all that is.
The world is now too dangerous for anything less than utopia.
Dare to be naive.
The minute you understand that you can make a difference, you will.
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.
Contemporaries of Buckminster Fuller
Other Architectures born within 50 years of Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983).