Quotes from Richard Buckminster Fuller

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

By and large, I seem to have made more mistakes than any others of whom I know, but have learned thereby to make ever swifter acknowledgment of the errors and thereafter immediately set about to deal more effectively with the truths disclosed by the acknowledgment of erroneous assumptions.

Everything you've learned in school as obvious becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.

God, to me, it seems, is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper.

Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering.

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

Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.

I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.

Specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the 'expert' is fooled into accepting a slavery by making him feel that he in turn is a socially and culturally preferred—ergo, highly secure—lifelong position.

If we dump all the machinery and take the knowledge we have in the ocean within six months humanity will die. If we dump all the politician all around the world in the ocean everything will go along very nicely.

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

Most importantly we have learned that from here on it is success for all or none, for it is experimentally proven by physics that "unity is plural and at minimum two" - the complementary but not mirror-imaged proton and neutron. You and I are inherently different and complimentary. Together we average as zero - that is, as eternity.

primarily the individual is going to study at home.

There is an effective strategy open to architects. Whereas doctors deal with the interior organisms of man, architects deal with the exterior organisms of man. Architects might join with one another to carry on their work in laboratories as do doctors in anticipatory medicine.

I would say, then, that you are faced with a future in which education is going to be number one amongst the great world industries.

The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways. The metaphysical is antientropic, methodically marshalling energy. Life is antientropic. It is spontaneously inquisitive. It sorts out and endeavors to understand

Architects, if they are really to be comprehensive, must assume the enormous task of thinking in terms always disciplined to the scale of the total world pattern of needs, its resource flows, its recirculatory and regenerative processes.

We as economic society are going to have to pay our whole population to go to school and pay it to stay at school.

A new, self-employed architect scientist is the one in all the world who may accelerate realization of a high-standard survival for all, as now completely practical within the scope of available technology.

It is new design by architects versus world revolution by political leadership.

The self-commissioned architect is the obviously exclusive potential - for as at present used, or designed, the world's resources are serving only forty-four per cent of humanity.

Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing…after they've tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked

Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.

Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.