R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes
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That which is communicated, i.e., understood, is metaphysical. The means of communication is physical.
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Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space.... Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship.
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Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate 'comprehensivity.
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Universe is the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences.
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Nature is a totally efficient, self-regenerati ng system. IF we discover the laws that govern this system and live synergistically within them, sustainability will follow and humankind will be a success.
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The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
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Each one of us has something to contribute. This really depends on each one doing their own thinking, but not following any kind of rule.
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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.
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Observation of my life to date shows that the larger the number for whom I work, the more positively effective I become. Thus, it is obvious that if I work always and only for all humanity, I will be optimally effective.
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[My vision is] To make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.
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There is something patently insane about all the typewriters sleeping with all the beautiful plumbing in the beautiful office buildings -and all the people sleeping in the slums.
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It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a 'higher standard of living than any have ever known.' It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable as mandated by survival.
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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.
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Don't attempt to reform man. An adequately organized environment will permit humanity's original, innate capabilities to become successful.
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Havenotness is caused by society's failure to design and produce the right tools and goods. Money alone is not the panacea.
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You have to decide whether you want to make money or make sense, because the two are mutually exclusive.
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No man can prove upon awakening that he is the man who he thinks went to bed the night before, or that anything that he recollects is anything other than a convincing dream.
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The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear. This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation.
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The synergetic integral of the totality of all principles is God, whose sum-total behavior in pure principle is beyond our comprehension and is utterly mysterious to us, because as humans--in pure principle--we do not and never will know all the principles
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Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war.
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We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief.... In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding.
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The eternal is omniembracing and permeative; and the temporal is linear. This opens up a very high order of generalizations of generalizations. The truth could not be more omni-important, although it is often manifestly operative only as a linear identification of a special-case experience on a specialized subject.
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Integrity is the courage and self-discipline to cooperate and initiate according to the Divine, which you know in your heart as Truth.
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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.