Misattributed Buckminster Fuller Quotes

Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword. ~ Thomas Fuller

Everyone is born a genius. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Life is the spirit incarnate in time. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I've been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That's a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we're in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

You can't change anything by fighting or resisting it. You change something by making it obsolete through superior methods. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

I figure...

...that the people are now more deeply conscious than ever before in history of the existence and functioning principles of universal, inexorable physical laws; of the pervading, quietly counseling truth within each and every one of us; of the power of love; and--each man by himself--of his own developing, dynamic relationship with his own conception of the Almightiness of the All-Knowing.

...that our contemporaries just don't wear their faith on their sleeves anymore.

...that people have removed faith from their sleeves because they found out for themselves that faith is much too important for careless display. Now they are willing to wait out the days and years for the truthful events, encouraged individually from within; and the more frequently the dramatic phrases advertising love, patriotism, fervent belief, morals, and good fellowship are plagiarized, appropriated and exhibited in the show windows of the world by the propaganda whips for indirect and ulterior motives, no matter how meager the compromise--the more do people withdraw within themselves and shun taking issue with the nauseating perversions, though eternally exhibiting quiet indifference, nonchalance or even cultivating seemingly ignorant acceptance. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

The further art advances the closer it approaches science, the further science advances the closer it approaches art. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

Unchallenged, opinions became respected precedent then exceptionless concepts and sometimes even civil and academically accepted social law. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

The assumption is that the inevitability of a solution's realization is inherent in the interaction of human intellect and the constantly transformative evolution of physical universe. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

Dare to be naive. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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 ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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. - BUCKMINSTER FULLER FROM ~ Vishen Lakhiani

The impossible happens. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

So I vowed to keep myself alive, but only if I would never use me again for just me - each one of us is born of two, and we really belong to each other. I vowed to do my own thinking, instead of trying to accommodate everyone else's opinion, credo's and theories. I vowed to apply my inventory of experiences to the solving of problems that affect everyone aboard planet Earth. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Racism, pollution and the rest of it are themselves very close to extinction. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

I set about fifty-five years ago (1927) to see what a penniless, unknown human individual with a dependent wife and newborn child might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

I haven't learned
How or why
Universe contrived to implode
And intellectually code
The myriadly unique
Chromosomically orchestrated
DNA-RNA,
Quadripartite moleculed,
Binary paired,
Helically extended
And unzippingly dichotomied
Regenerative symphonic
jazz, as
A one and two,
Three and four
Me---You,
Thee---They
And more
Thine and mine,
Sweet citizen,
THYMINE-CYTOSINE
GUANINE-ADENINE ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Doing the right things for the wrong reasons is typical of humanity. Precession - not conscious planning - provides a productive outcome for misguided political and military campaigns. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do ... HOW WOULD I BE? WHAT WOULD I DO? ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Children, as well as grown-ups, in their individual, glorified, drudgery-proof homes of Labrador, the tropics, the Orient, or where you will, to which they can pass with pleasure and
expedition by means of ever-improving transportation, will be able to tune in their television and radio to the moving picture lecture of, let us say, President Lowell of Harvard; the
professor of Mathematics of Oxford; of the doctor of Indian antiquities of Delhi, etc. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Either war is obsolete, or men are. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

You can make money or you can make sense. The two are mutually exclusive. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Whether we are able to be a complete success or failure is in such critical balance that every smallest human test of integrity every smallest moment-to-moment decision tips the scales affirmatively or negatively. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

I am not optimistic or pessimistic. I feel that optimism and pessimism are very unbalanced. I am a very hard engineer. I am a mechanic. I am a sailor. I am an air pilot. I don't tell people I can get you across the ocean with my ship unless I know what I'm talking about. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

We are going to have to find ways of organizing ourselves cooperatively,sanely, scientifically, harmonically and in regenerative spontaneity with the rest of humanity around the earth ... 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. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Whenever I draw a circle, I immediately want to step out of it. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

For man to go from less than 1% haves to 40%, living at high standard - despite decreasing resources - cannot be explained by anything other than by doing more than less. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Whether humanity is to comprehensively prosper ... depends entirely on the integrity of the human individuals and not on the political and economic systems. The cosmic question has been asked: are humans worthwhile to universe invention? ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system's separate parts or any subassembly of
the system's parts. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

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. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Geniuses are just people who had good mothers. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller