64 Buckminster Fuller Quotes On Change, Obsolete, Work, Success

Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as “Spaceship Earth”, “Dymaxion” (e.g., Dymaxion house, Dymaxion car, Dymaxion map), “ephemeralization”, “synergetics”, and “tensegrity”. These Buckminster Fuller quotes will motivate you in life.

Best Buckminster Fuller Quotes

1. “Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren’t any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn’t be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life’s challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
2. “You cannot change how someone thinks, but you can give them a tool to use which will lead them to think differently.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller , Buckminster Fuller quotes on change
3. “You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. The significance of you will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all you experience to highest advantage to others. Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

4. “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

5. “Nature is a totally efficient, self-regenerating system. If we discover the laws that govern this system and live synergistically within them, sustainability will follow and humankind will be a success.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
6. “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.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
7. “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.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
8. “Mistakes are great, the more I make the smarter I get.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
9. “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.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
10. “If I ran a school, I’d give the average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers, for being good parrots. I’d give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they learned from them.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

11. “Don’t fight forces, use them.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

12. “Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before – that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
13. “Geniuses are just people who had good mothers.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
14. “Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing…after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
15. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller , Buckminster Fuller quotes on obsolete
16. “The minute you begin to do what you really want to do, it’s really a different kind of life.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

17. “Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

18. “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.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
19. “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.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
20. “I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
21. “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
22. “I have spent most of my life unlearning things that were proved not to be true” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
23. “We were deliberately designed to learn only by trial and error. We’re brought up, unfortunately, to think that nobody should make mistakes. Most children get de-geniused by the love and fear of their parents – that they might make a mistake. But all my advances were made by mistakes. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn’t.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
24. “It is not for me to change you. The question is, how can I be of service to you without diminishing your degrees of freedom?” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

25. “Don’t try to make me consistent. I am learning all the time.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

26. “Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren’t any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn’t be here in the first place.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
27. “Real wealth is ideas plus energy.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
28. “The purpose of our lives is to add value to the people of this generation and those that follow.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
29. “Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment…. Humanity is in ‘final exam’ as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
30. “Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
31. “Integrity is the courage and self-discipline to cooperate and initiate according to the Divine, which you know in your heart as Truth.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
32. “Ignorance and greed are part of the evolutionary process, which is just to say that mistakes are part of learning. There is nothing bad about behaviors or perceptions that do not work; they simply have to be given up and replaced by behaviors or perceptions that do work.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

33. “There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

34. “If man chooses oblivion, he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders. If he chooses Utopia, he must initiate an enormous education program – immediately, if not sooner.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
35. “If humans are not required to earn a living to be provided survival needs, many are going to want very much to be productive, but not at those tasks they did not choose to do but were forced to accept in order to earn money. Instead, humans will spontaneously take upon themselves those tasks that world society really needs to have done.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller , Buckminster Fuller quotes on money
36. “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. Caught up in a plethora of conditioned reflexes and driven by the human ego, both warden and prisoner attempt meagerly to compete with God. All are intractably skeptical of what they do not understand. We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

37. “To do more and more with less and less until eventually, you can do everything with nothing.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

38. “There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
39. “Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
40. “The things to do are the things that need doing: that you see need to be done and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done – that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
41. “It is essential to release humanity from the false fixations of yesterday which seem now to bind it to a rationale of action leading only to extinction.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
42. “You can rest assured that if you devote your time and attention to the highest advantage of others, the Universe will support you, always and only in the nick of time.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
43. “There is no energy crisis, only a crisis of ignorance.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

44. “All human advances occur in the outlaw area.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

45. “You can’t change anything by fighting or resisting it. You change something by making it obsolete through superior methods.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
46. “A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
47. “When individuals join in a cooperative venture, the power generated far exceeds what they could have accomplished acting individually.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
48. “Our beds are empty two-thirds of the time. Our living rooms are empty seven-eighths of the time. Our office buildings are empty one-half of the time. It’s time we gave this some thought.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
49. “You never change people by fighting their existing reality.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
50. “Either man is obsolete or war is. War is the ultimate tool of politics. Political leaders look out only for their own side. Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

51. “The nearest each of us can come to God is by loving the truth.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

52. “[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.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller , Buckminster Fuller quotes on work
53. “The World has become too dangerous for anything less than Utopia.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
54. “You can’t change the way people think, all you can do is give them a tool, the use of which will change their thinking.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
55. “Those who play with the devil’s toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
56. “I’m utterly convinced that we are all here for one another and that every experience that everyone is having is relevant. It all counts. The Universe is so extraordinarily well designed that it needs all those experiences.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

57. “We are prisoners of our own metaphors, metaphorically speaking.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

58. “… reform the environment and not man; being absolutely confident that if you give man the right environment, he will behave favorably.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
59. “You don’t belong to you. You belong to the Universe and you’re here to serve.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
60. “We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
61. “I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
62. “If you change the environment, you change the people.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
63. “I look for what needs to be done. After all, that’s how the universe designs itself.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
64. “The vector equilibrium is the zero point for happenings or non happenings: it is the empty theater and empty circus and empty universe ready to accommodate any act and any audience.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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