BUCKMINSTER FULLER BIBLIOGRAPHY
MATERIALS BY BUCKY: Quotes/N-Z

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Nature has a very basic pattern governing frequencies & energy-event magnitudes.  The biggest energy-events occur least frequently & the smallest energy-events most frequently. ? ?
Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us.  We are not the only experiment. Minneapolis Tribune, 4-30-78 p ?
Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible & untouchable. ? ?
No more keeping up with the Jones; no bunk; no secrets; the dawning of a great & new age. ? ?
No single picture is going to tell you that a caterpillar is going to become a butterfly; & one picture won't tell you that a butterfly flies. ? ?
Nobody is born a specialist.  Every child is born with comprehensive interests, asking the most comprehensively logical & relevant questions.  Pointing to the logs burning in the fireplace, one child asked me, "What is fire?"  I answered, "Fire is the Sun unwinding from the tree's log." Critical Path 62
None of the inventory of generalized principles is contradictory to one another.  They are all inter-accommodative. ? ?
Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, & that is that no instruction book came with it. Operating Manual for SS Earth 47
O
...Observation showed that the larger the number for whom I worked, the more positively effective I become.  Thus, it is obvious that if I worked always & only for all humanity, I would be optimally effective. Critical Path 125
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. Operating Manual for SS Earth 12
On the sea, people had to continually do more with less.  And in the air even more severely so. Thus there were two completely different worlds which really fostered advanced engineering. U of Alaska Lecture, 4-20-72 1
One of humanity's prime drives is to understand & be understood.  All other living creatures are designed for the highly specialized tasks.  Man seems unique as the comprehensive comprehender & co-ordinator of local universe affairs. Operating Manual for SS Earth 13
Only cosmic accounting accounts for the entirely interdependent electrochemical & ecological relationships of Earth's biological evolution & cosmic intertransformative regeneration in general.  Cosmic costing accounts as well for the parts played gravitationally & radiationally in the totality within which our miniscule planet Earth & its miniscule star the Sun are interfunctionally secreted.  Cosmic costing makes utterly ludicrous the selfish & fearfully contrived "wealth" games being reverentially played by humanity aboard Earth. Critical Path ?
Only then will society be able to identify, & inter-communicate, the vital problems of total world society.  Only then may humanity effectively sort out & put those problems into an order of importance for solutions that will work for all life on Earth. ? ?
Our beds are empty 2/3rds of the time.  Our living rooms are empty 7/8ths of the time. Our office buildings are empty 1/2 of the time.  It's time we gave this some thought. ? ?

Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences.  Only our minds are able to discover the generalized principles operating without exception in each & every special-experience case which if detected & mastered will give knowledgeable advantage in all instances.

 Operating Manual for SS Earth 9

Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space.  [...]  Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented & designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship.

 " 44-5

Our most prominent present local Universe problem is how to wean humanity from metabolic sustenance only by exploiting nature's local Universe energy savings account--energy being locally imported by cosmic evolution design to produce a new star ten billion years hence.  How can we convince those in power the world around that we can live handsomely as supplied only by our daily income of cosmic energy?  The answer is we can't convince them.  Only the cosmic wisdom manifest in inexorable evolution can cope with such matters.

 Critical Path ?
Our power is in our ability to decide. ? ?
Our tetrahedron, who art in geometry, hollowed by thy concavity, thy convexity come, thy system be dome, on Urth as it is in Universe.  Give us this eternity, our daily integrity, and fore-give us our dis-integrations, as we fore-give those, who dis-integrate around us.  And lead us only in -- to syntegration, and de-livery us from entropic monofocus, on material self-interest, universe within universe, amen. ? ?
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Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election.  They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers. Critical Path? p ?
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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 1.3.2
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Racism, pollution & the rest of it are themselves very close to extinction. Playboy 2-72 p ?
Real wealth is ideas plus energy. ? ?
Really great artists are scientists, & the really great scientists are artists & both are inventors.  I think that all humans are born artist-scientist-inventors but that life progressively squelches the individual's drive & capabilities. ? ?
S
So I vowed to keep myself alive, but only if i would never use me again for just me.  Each of us is born of two, & we really belong to each other. ? ?
Society likes the idea of a bank as a safekeeping device.  People have always believed that when they put their money in the bank, it stayed there.  They had no idea it went out on loan within minutes after it came in.  They were completely hoodwinked by the appearance of the banks as safe, fireproof, & robberproof depositories of their earnings.  Even today, in the last few years of the twentieth century, people know little more about banks than they did during the 1929 Crash or at the depth of the Depression in 1932, when all they knew was that they had lost their deposits in most of them. Critical Path 89
Sometimes I think we're alone.  sometimes I think we're not.  In either case, the thought is staggering. ? ?
Specialization tends to shut off the wide-band tuning searches & thus to preclude further discovery of the all-powerful generalized principles. Synergetics xxvii
Sum-totally, we find that the physical constituent of wealth--energy--cannot decrease & that the metaphysical constituent--know-how--can only increase.  This is to say that every time we use our wealth it increases. Operating Manual for SS Earth 85
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.  There is nothing in the chemistry of a toenail that predicts the existence of a human being. " 64

Synergy is the only word in our language which identifies the meaning for which it stands.  Since the word is unknown to the average public, as I have already pointed out, it is not at all surprising that synergy has not been included in the economic accounting of our wealth transactions or in assessing our common wealth capabilities.

 " 87-8
Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately. Synergetics 101.00
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...take the initiative.  Go to work, & above all co-operate & don't hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another.  Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived.  These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing & trying to make clear to us.  They are not man-made laws.  They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the intellectual integrity governing universe. Operating Manual for SS Earth 120
The courage to adhere to the truth as we learn it involves ... the courage to face ourselves with the clear admission of all the mistakes we have made. ? ?
The Dark Ages still reign over all humanity, & the depth & 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 & built of misinformation.  Caught up in a plethora of conditioned reflexes & driven by the human ego, both warden & 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. Cosmography 1
The Design Scientist must be a responsible participant in nature's own evolution, self-discipling to deal comprehensively & capably with the maximum & minimum of the combined & complementary physical & metaphysical subdivisions of universe. ? ?
The difference between mind & brain is that brain deals only with memorized, subjective, special-case experiences & objective experiments, while mind extracts & employs the generalized principles & integrates & interrelates their effective employment.  Brain deals exclusively with the physical, & mind exclusively with the metaphysical. Operating Manual for SS Earth 85
The eternal is omniembracing & permeative; & the temporal is linear.  This opens up a very high order of generalizations of generalizations.  The truth could not be more omni-important, although it is often manifestly operative only as a linear identification of a special-case experience on a specialized subject. Synergetics 1005.52
The explicable requires the inexplicable.  Experience requires the nonexperienceable.  The obvious requires the mystical.  This is a powerful group of paired concepts generated by the complementarity of conceptuality. " 501.13
The highest of generalizations is the synergetic integration of truth & love. " 1005.56
The individual can take initiatives without anybody's permission. ? ?
The metaphysical embraces all the weightless experiences of thought, including all the mathematics & the organization of data regarding all the physical experiments, science being metaphysical. Synergetics 306.01
The most important fact about Spaceship Earth: An instruction book didn't come with it. ? ?
The nearest each of us can come to God is by loving the truth. Critical Path ?
The new human networks' emergence represents the natural evolutionary expansion into the just completed, thirty-years-in-its-building, world-embracing, physical communications network.  The new reorienting of human networking constitutes the heart-and-mind-pumped flow of life & intellect into world arteries.    (The Internet, 1982) Grunch of Giants xxi-xxii
The old world of architecture was simply self-expression.  We have the task of making man a success. ? ?
The one common experience of all humanity is the challenge of problems. ? ?
The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways.  The metaphysical is antientropic, methodically marshalling energy.  Life is antientropic.  It is spontaneously inquisitive.  It sorts out & endeavors to understand. Synergetics 1.3.2
The present evolutionary crisis of humans on planet Earth is that of a final examination for their continuance in Universe.  It is not an examination of political, economic, or religious systems, but of the integrity of each & all individual humans' responsible thinking & unselfish response to the acceleration in evolution's evermore unprecedented events. ? ?
The procedure we are pursuing is that of true democracy.  Semi-democracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws.  True democracy discovers by patient experiment & unanimous acknowledgement what the laws of nature or universe may be for the physical support & metaphysical satisfaction of the human intellect's function in universe. Operating Manual for SS Earth ?
The things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, & 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. Letter to Michael, 2-16-70 ?
The word generalization in literature usually means covering too much territory too thinly to be persuasive, let alone convincing.  In science, however, a generalization means a principle that has been found to hold true in every special case.  [...]  The principle of leverage is a scientific generalization. Synergetics 1.3.2
The World Game: 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. ? ?
The world will be saved by individuals of integrity freely joining. ? ?
The would-be exploiters of atomic energy on board our planet Earth will in due course discover there is no way for them to solve atomic-energy-radiation waste-disposal problems save by rocketing it all back into the sun, where it belongs.  Humans will then have to learn how to keep all humans & their ecological support system operating successfully on our vastly adequate daily income of solar atomic energy. Critical Path 346
Then Einstein, Planck & other leading scientists said "We're going to have to reassess & redefine the physical universe."  They defined the physical universe as "an aggregate of non-simultaneous & only partially overlapping transformation events. Operating Manual for SS Earth 82
There are no solids.  There are no things.  There are only interfering & noninterfering patterns operative in pure principle, & principles are eternal.  Principles never contradict principles.  [...]  The synergetic integral of the totality of principles is God, whose sum-total behavior in pure principle is beyond our comprehension & is utterly mysterious to us, because as humans---in pure principle---we do not & never will know all the principles. Critical Path 158
There is an inherently minimum set of essential concepts & current information, cognizance of which could lead to our operating our planet Earth to the lasting satisfaction & health of all humanity. Synergetics 1.3.2
There is no energy crisis, food crisis or environmental crisis.  There is only a crisis of ignorance. Energy, Earth & Everyone 1
There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. ? ?
There is only one revolution tolerable to all men, all societies, all political systems: revolution by design & invention. I Seem to Be a Verb 87-A
There is something patently insane about all the typewriters sleeping with all the beautiful plumbing in the beautiful office buildings--& all the people sleeping in the slums. ? ?
There's a major pattern of energy in universe wherein the very large events, earthquakes, & so forth, occur in any one area of universe very much less frequently than do the small energy events.  Around the Earth insects occur more often than do earthquakes.  In the patterning of total evolutionary events, there comes a time, once in a while, amongst the myriad of low energy events, when a large energy event transpires & is so disturbing that with their general adaptability lost, the ultra-specialized creatures perish. Operating Manual for SS Earth ?
Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies. Utopia or Oblivion ?
This book is written with the conviction that there are no "good" or "bad" people, no matter how offensive or eccentric to society they may seem.  [...]  You & I didn't design people.  God designed people.  What I am trying to do is to discover why God included humans in Universe. Critical Path ?
Through improved materials & alternate systems---such as going from wired to wireless telegraphy---we can produce ever higher performance per each pound of material, minute of time, & watt of energy invested, accomplishing so much more with so relatively little resource per function, that we are able to sustain all humanity at a higher standard of living than heretofore experienced or dreamed of by any human. Popular Science, May 1972 128
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. Critical Path p ?
Topology provides the synergetic means of ascertaining the values of any system of experiences.  Topology is the science of fundamental pattern & structural relationships of event constellations. Operating Manual for SS Earth 66
Truth is a tendency. ? ?
Truth is cosmically total: synergetic.  Verities are generalized principles stated in semimetaphorical terms.  Verities are differentiable.  But love is omniembracing, omnicoherent, & omni-inclusive, with no exceptions.  Love, like synergetics, is nondifferentiable, i.e., integral. Synergetics 1005.54
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Unity is plural and, at minimum, is two. Synergetics 224.12
Universe is synergetic.  Life is synergetic. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth 66
Upon the premise that the sum-total of human desire to survive is dominant over the sum-total of the impulse to destroy, this book is designed. Nine Chains to the Moon ix
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We are all astronauts. Expanded Cinema 20
We are all passengers on Spaceship Earth. ? ?

We are being taught ... to assume as closely as possible the viewpoint, the patience, & the competence of God.

 Critical Path 251
We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims. ? ?
We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, & desirable.  Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief.  [...]  In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding.  Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, & confusion in individuals.  It has also resulted in the individual's leaving responsibility for thinking & social action to others.  Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international & ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war. Synergetics 1.3.2
We are now synergetically forced to conclude that all phenomena are metaphysical; wherefore, as many have long suspected--like it or not--life is but a dream. " "
We are on a spaceship; a beautiful one.  It took billions of years to develop.  We're not going to get another.  Now, how do we make this spaceship work? ? ?
We are prisoners of our own metaphors, metaphorically speaking. ? ?
We begin to discover all kinds of new chemical, biological & electromagnetic behaviors of the invisible realm so that today 99.999 percent of the search & research for everything that is going to affect our lives tomorrow is being conducted in the realm of reality nondirectly contactable by the human senses.  It takes a really educated human to be able to cope with the vast & exquisite ranges of reality. BF: Anthology for the New Millennium 305
We evolute toward ever lesser brain comprehension lags--ergo, toward ever diminishing error; ergo, ever diminishing misunderstandings; ergo, ever diminishing fear, & its brain-lagging painful errors of objectivity; wherefore we approach eternal instantaneity of absolute & total comprehension.  The eternal instantaneity of no lag at all.  However, we have now learned from our generalizations of the great complexity of the interactions of principles as we are disembarrassed of our local, exclusively physical chemistry of information-sensing devices--that what is approached is eternal & instant awareness of absolute reality of all that ever existed.  All the great metaphysical integrity of all the individuals, which is potential & inherent in the complex interactions of generalized principles, will always & only coexist eternally. Synergetics 1.3.4
We must start with scientific fundamentals, & that means with the data of experiments & not with assumed axioms predicated only upon the misleading nature of that which only superfically seems to be obvious.  It is the consensus of great scientists that science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience. " 1.3.2
What humans have spontaneously identified as good & bad--or as positive & negative--are evolutionary complementations in need of more accurate identifications. Critical Path ix
What is now as clear as the speed of light itself is our realization that we've come to enough knowledge about how to do so much with so little.  [...]  The metaphysical really masters the physical. ? ?
Whatever I was going to be able to do had to be by virtue of my dealing with the only asset I had, & that was my experience. ? ?
When blimp photographs are taken of giant stadia packed full of rock-concert or football fans, we get an idea of what 100,000 people look like.  We all think of Hiroshima as the worst single killing of humans by humans.  That was about a 75,000-capacity-coliseum-full.  Each day of each year, year after year, a 75,000-capacity-stadiumfull of around-the-world humans perish from starvation or its side effects, despite an annual average 5-percent world food-production overage of the amount of food adequate for the total world's population.  This daily kill of innocents dwarfs the awful Auschwitz killing. Grunch of Giants 2-3
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty.  I only think about how to solve the problem.  But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. ? ?
When I was twenty-seven years of age (in 1922) Earthian humanity knew of only one galaxy--our own Milky (Latin: Galactic) Way.  A year later astronomer Hubble discovered another galaxy.  During the subsequent fifty-seven years, human astronomers & astrophysicists have discovered two billion more galaxies, all doing their galactic acts within the eleven-and-one-half-billion-light-year-radiused sphere of humanity's present limit (1981) of omnidirectional observing. Critical Path ?
When people discard the notion that ownership is important, they will not be burdened with possessions.  The less we own, the greater our mobility. I Seem to Be a Verb p ?
When we approach our problems on a universal, general systems basis & progressively eliminate the irrelevancies, somewhat as we peel petals from an artichoke, at each move we leave in full visibility the next most important layer of factors with which we must deal.  We gradually uncover you & me in the heart of now. ? ?
Whenever I draw a circle, I immediately want to step out of it. I Seem to Be a Verb 5-A
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... Critical Path ?
While no politician or political system can ever afford to yield understandably & enthusiastically to their adversaries & opposers, all politicians can & will yield enthusiastically to the computers safe flight-controlling capabilities in bringing all of humanity in for a happy landing. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth 120
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You can never change things by resisting reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete. ? ?
You can't better the world by simply talking to it.  Philosophy to be effective must be mechanically applied. ? ?
You have got to remember always that neither you nor others "know what it's all about."  Those who think they "know what it's all about" learn nothing. ? ?
You may very appropriately want to ask me how we are going to resolve the ever-accelerating dangerous impasse of world-opposed politicians & ideological dogmas.  I answer, it will be resolved by the computer. Operating Manual for SS Earth 120
You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. ? ?

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