Top 45 R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes

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

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

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

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

Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.

Either war is obsolete, or men are.

God is a verb, not a noun.

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

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.

Gold and silver from the dead turn often into lead.

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

My ideas have undergone a process of emergence by emergency. When they are needed badly enough, they are accepted.

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

The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.

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

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.

Man knows so much and does so little.

War is the ultimate tool of politics.

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

A proverb is much matter distilled into few words.

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.

Truth is a tendency.

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

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

How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.

Love is metaphysical gravity.

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

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented.

Don’t fight forces, use them.

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

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

Tombs are the clothes of the dead and a grave is a plain suit; while an expensive monument is one with embroidery.

Rashness is the faithful, but unhappy parent of misfortune.

Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices.

By 2000, politics will simply fade away. We will not see any political parties.

Here is God’s purpose – for God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.

Dictators never invent their own opportunities.

If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.

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

Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.

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

We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.

The most important thing about Spaceship Earth – an instruction book didn’t come with it.