QUOTE GALLERY
“Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction.”
Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), pg. xxvii.
"Workshop on Commitment" Quotes
In 1975 after having travelled around the planet with Bucky for 15 months, I got inspired to begin thinking about creating an in depth all-day format event to explore the underlying principles to Bucky's approach to "what the individual can do." I submitted a proposal to the UCLA Extension Department as a possible host of an event and eventually ended up in producing an event in San Francisco in May of 1975 called “Being with Bucky” which took place at the Miyako Hotel, was two full days with Bucky. Below are the quotations submitted with that proposal. - Jaime Snyder
“... ‘individual’ man’s highest potential may be realized in terms of full interaction of all men’s potential-”
No More Secondhand God (1963), pg. 72.
“The minute you were not concerned with earning a living and really tackled problem after problem that the other fellow was not tackling, there proved to be a wealth of solvable problems… If I have made progress that is mildly notable it is only because I walked into a vast, unattended potential harvest.”
Ideas and Integrities (1958), p. 87.
“I have learned
That man knows little
And thinks he knows a lot.
When any man can tell us
Just how and why he is handling and disposing
The energies of his breakfast;
How he breaks down his chemical energy and
To which glands he is routing
The diversified energies of his ham and eggs;
Or when any man can tell us
That he is deliberately
Pushing each of his million
“one of the rules of nature is that she permits as each day the integrity of that day’s thinking…”
Ideas and Integrities (1969), "Later Developments of my Work", pg. 72.
“Man now enters the phase of meager yet conscious participation in the anticipatory design undertakings of nature. This conscious participation itself is changing from an awkward, arbitrary, trial and error ignorance to an intuitively conceived, yet rigorously serviced, disciplined elegance…”
Ideas and Integrities (1969), pg. 323.
“From my viewpoint, by far the greatest challenge facing the young people today is that of responding and conforming only to their own most delicately insistent intuitive awareness of what the truth seems to them to be as based on their own experiences and not on what others have interpreted to be the truth regarding events of which neither they nor others have experienced based knowledge.”
Education Automation, "Mistake Mystique", pg. 161.
“... Whatever I was going to be able to do had to be by virtue of my dealing with the only asset I had, and that was my experience. So I had to do something about looking my experience over and though nobody had taught me how to think, I had to learn to think…”
Ideas and Integrities (1969), "Later Developments of My Work", pg. 72.
“I made a bargain with myself that I’d discover the principles operative in the universe and turn them over to my fellow men.”
The Graduate Review (1976), "Interview with R. Buckminster Fuller."
“Emancipation of individuality requires elimination of the slave mentality. It is the realization of the inherently inviolable integrity of the individual.”
Earth, Inc. (1973), pg. 180.
“We are now entered into Earthian’s most critical moment, that of imminent, technically feasible economic success for all humanity. This however, is frustrated by the large and prosperous minority’s fearful procrastination at the entrance into the unknown, epochal changes, obviously essential to realization of comprehensive human success and total planetary freedoms and enjoyment.”
Earth, Inc. (1973), pg. 75.
“... individual man may at his own will and discretion be at any one moment either a “standby” or an “active” function of universe.”
No More Secondhand God (1963), pg. 109.
“Men used to say that man the scientist brought order out of chaos. The scientists are about to discover that all that was chaotic was in man’s illiterate and bewildered imagination and fearful ignorance.”
No More Secondhand God (1963), pg. 33
“Universe need’s man’s intellectual capability which discovers some of the eternal laws operating in total Universe and applies them to local problem solving. That is our only meaning to each other.”
Earth, Inc. (1973), pg. 179.
“and only within his mind-self does man meet and deal with all the challenge of integrity itself.”
No More Secondhand God (1963), pg. 110.
I don't care if I'm not understood as long as I'm not misunderstood.
- RBF, (Synergetics Dictionary, card number 15451)
Head hairs
Out through his scalp
At specifically preferred rates
And in specifically controlled shapes
For specific purposes
We may say that his man
Knows a little,
But i don’t know of any man
Who can tell me
So little even as
Why we have hair.”
And It Came to Pass – Not to Stay, “How Little I know”, pg. 54-55.
“RBF inaugurates computer game at Southern Illinois University, called World Game, how to make world work in such a manner that all of humanity can become physical and economic success and can enjoy all of Earth without one interfering with the other and without any one advantaged at expense of other.” - Critical Path (1981)
THE ESTATE OF R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
