R. Buckminster Fuller Thinking Quotations

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

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

You cannot change how someone thinks, but you can give them a tool to use which will lead them to think differently.

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.

Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before - that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.

We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.

The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and 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 and built of misinformation. Caught up in a plethora of conditioned reflexes and driven by the human ego, both warden and 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.

There is enough for everyone. People think that there isn't enough, so they get as much as they can, so many people don't have enough.

I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.

Human beings are the only creatures on the planet that tell time and think they have to earn a living.

You can't change the way people think, all you can do is give them a tool, the use of which will change their thinking.

. . . 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.

I'm not trying to counsel any of you to do anything really special except dare to think. And to dare to go with the truth. And to dare to really love completely.

Nature is all that we think we know plus all that we don't know whether or not we know that we don't know it.

When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem.

It is one of the strange facts of experience that when we try to think about the future, our thoughts jump backwards. It may well be that nature has some fundamental metaphysical law by which opening up what we call the future also opens up the past in equal degree.

The individual can take initiatives without anybody's permission. Only individuals can think. Only the individual disregards his fears and commits himself exclusively to reforming the human environment.

I have to say, I think that we are in some kind of final examination as to whether human beings now, with this capability to acquire information and to communicate, whether we're really qualified to take on the responsibility we're designed to be entrusted with. And this is not a matter of an examination of the types of governments, nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with economic systems. It has to do with the individual. Does the individual have the courage to really go along with the truth?

Above all, I am motivated by the most mysterious drive we ever experience -that of love - I don't think there's any influence on my life that compares with love.

The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living

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.

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.

My biggest hope that we're going to make it here is that this thinking is being manifested & really employed by the young world. Will they be going fast enough to overcome the initiatives of the bureaucracies & the fears operative in those bureaucracies? It's a very touch & go question.

Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.

Each one of us has something to contribute. This really depends on each one doing their own thinking, but not following any kind of rule...