R. Buckminster Fuller

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

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

Love is metaphysical gravity.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

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

Rashness is the faithful, but unhappy parent of misfortune.

War is the ultimate tool of politics.

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

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.

Dictators never invent their own opportunities.

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.

A proverb is much matter distilled into few words.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Don't fight forces, use them.

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

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

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

What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.

Man knows so much and does so little.

Truth is a tendency.

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

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

Tension is the great integrity.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Either war is obsolete, or men are.

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.

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.

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.

Gold and silver from the dead turn often into lead.