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.

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.

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

There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.

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?

Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing_after they__e tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked

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.

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. Advancing science has now discovered that all the known cases of biological extinction have been caused by overspecialization, whose concentration of only selected genes sacrifices general adaptability. Thus the specialist__ brief for pinpointing brevity is dubious. In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual__ leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which in turn leads to war.

Science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary _ the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab.It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.So I said, call me Trimtab.

We as economic society are going to have to pay our whole population to go to school and pay it to stay at school.

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.

...primarily the individual is going to study at home.

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

Let architects sing of aesthetics that bring Rich clients in hordes to their knees; Just give me a home, in a great circle dome Where stresses and strains are at ease.

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

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