R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes
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"The further art advances the closer it approaches science," said Leonardo da Vinci, painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and inventor of the wheelbarrow, and other useful instruments from the speaking tube to a mechanically gyp-proof whore-house, "the further science advances the closer it approaches art."
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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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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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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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In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.
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The most important part about tomorrow is not the technology or the automation, but that man is going to come into entirely new relationships with his fellow men. He will retain much more in his everyday life of what we term the naïveté and idealism of the child. I think the way to see what tomorrow is going to look like is just to look at our children.
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What humans have spontaneously identified as good and bad - or as positive and negative - are evolutionary complementations in need of more accurate identifications.
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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.
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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 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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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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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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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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Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war.
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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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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 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.
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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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Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.
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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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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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With our minds alone we can discover those principles we need to employ to convert all humanity to success in a new, harmonious relationship with the universe.
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History's political and economic power structures have always abhorred 'idle people' as potential troublemakers. Yet nature never abhors seemingly idle trees, grass, snails, coral reefs, and clouds in the sky.
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One of humanity's prime drives is to understand and be understood. All other living creatures are designed for highly specialized tasks. Man seems unique as the comprehensive comprehender