Excerps from Critical Path : Buckminister Fuller

Quotes and excerpts from Buckminister's writings

• "Whenever I draw a circle, I immediately want to step out of it." -- R. Buckminster Fuller

• "You must choose between making money and making sense. The two are mutually exclusive."

• "What are the resources? What are the tasks necessary to make 100% of humanity a success?

How can we ever do so without ever advantaging one human at the expense of another? How may we render all the world and all its treasures enjoyable available to all men without having one interfering with or trespassing upon the other?

How may we reform the environment so that the integrity of all society is not violated by the free initiatives of the individual nor the integrity of the individual violated by the developing welfaring advantage and happiness of the many?

Man is born a potentially complete success. The reasons humanity loves its children is that they start off in such perfection of potential. Man, as designed, is obviously intended to be a success just as the hydrogen atom is intended to e a success. It is only the fabulous ignorance of man and his long and wrongly conditioned reflexes that he continually allowed the new life to be impaired albeit lovingly and unwittingly". --R. Buckminster Fuller NASA Speech, June 1966

• “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 b a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.” -- Buckminster Fuller 1980

• “Humanity is moving ever deeper into crisis - a crisis without precedent.

First, it is a crisis brought about by cosmic evolution irrevocably intent upon completely transforming omnidisintegrated humanity from a complex of around-the-world, remotely-deployed-from-one-another, differently colored, differently credoed, differently cultured, differently communicating, and differently competing entities into a completely integrated, comprehensively interconsiderate, harmonious whole.

Second, we are in an unprecedented crisis because cosmic evolution is also irrevocably intent upon making omni-integrated humanity omnisuccessful, able to live sustainingly at an unprecedentedly higher standard of living for all Earthians than has ever been experienced by any; able to live entirely within its cosmic-energy income instead of spending its cosmic energy savings account (i.e., the fossil fuels) or spending its cosmic-capital plant and equipment account (i.e., atomic energy)-the atoms with which our Spaceship Earth and its biosphere are structured and equipped-a spending folly no less illogical than burning your house-and-home to keep the family warm on an unprecedentedly cold midwinter night. Humanity's cosmic-energy income account consists entirely of our gravity-and star (99 percent Sun)-distributed cosmic dividends of water power, tidal power, wave power, wind power, vegetation-produced alcohols, methane gas, vulcanism, and so on.

Humanity's present rate of total energy consumption amounts to only one four-millionth of one percent of the rate of its energy income. ...Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to make it economically on this planet and in the Universe. We do.” -- Buckminster Fuller, from the introduction to Critical Path

• "A lot of people think or believe or know they feel (experience) -- but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling (experiencing). Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel (experience). Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel (experience), you're nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." --From Critical Path

• "All technical evolution has a fundamental behavior pattern. First there is scientific discovery of a generalized principle, which occur as a subjective realizatin by an experimentally probin individual. Next comes objective employment of that principle in a special case invention. Next the invention is reduced to practice. This gives humanity an increased technical advantage over the physical environment. If successful as a tool of society, the invention is used in bigger, swifter, and everyday ways. For instance, it goes progressively from a little steel steamship to ever-bigger fleets of constantly swifter, higher-powered ocean giants." --From Critical Path

• "All the technical curves rise in tonnage and volumetric size to reach a 'giant' peak, after which progressive miniturization sets in. After that, a new and more economical art takes over and then goes through the same cycle of doing progressively more with less, first by getting bigger and taking advantage, for instance, of the fact that doubling the length of a ship increases its wetted surface fourfold but increases its payload volume eightfold."--From Critical Path