Quotes by "R. Buckminster Fuller"

The most important fact about Spaceship Earth: an instruction book didn't come with it.

God is a verb, not a noun.

Dare to be naive.

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab. It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, call me Trimtab.

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.

Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

One in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a wage.

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

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

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.

People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.

If you are the master be sometimes blind, if you are the servant be sometimes deaf.

Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.

A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.

I look for what needs to be done. After all, that's how the universe designs itself.