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)
The true wealth of a nation lies in its people.
The only thing that is constant is change.
We must do away with the idea that we are separate from nature.
The universe is a continuous, never-ending process of creation.
The greatest resource we have is our ingenuity.
We are all born with genius, but society quickly dulls it.
The only way to solve the world's problems is to make them obsolete.
The more we know, the more we realize how much we don't know.
The highest form of wealth is the ability to create.
We are all responsible for the future of humanity.
The universe is always trying to make things easier.
The most powerful force in the universe is love.
When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only of how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.
The minute you choose to do what you really want to do, it's a different kind of life.
Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.
We are all astronauts on a little spaceship called Earth.
Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.
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.
Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately.
Contemporaries of Buckminster Fuller
Other Architectures born within 50 years of Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983).