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)
We are all born with genius, but we lose it as we grow up.
The most important fact about Spaceship Earth: an instruction book didn't come with it.
You can't learn less. You can only learn more.
The best way to predict the future is to design it.
We are all passengers on Spaceship Earth.
The only way to make a difference is to be different.
The universe is a continuous process.
I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.
The true business of people is to go on co-operating and not to be stopped by anything.
There is no such thing as waste.
Don't fight forces, use them.
Love is metaphysical gravity.
Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.
We are called to be architects of the future, not its demolition experts.
The universe is non-simultaneously apprehended.
Either war is obsolete or men are.
Nature has... some sort of arithmetical-geometrical coordinate system, because nature has all kinds of models.
Change the size of the image of the universe and you change the size of the image of the self.
Universe to each must be All that is, including me. Environment is all that is other than me.
Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts.
Contemporaries of Buckminster Fuller
Other Architectures born within 50 years of Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983).