Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Richard Buckminster Fuller: Be That One Person

My lifelong conservative grandfather, who we buried at West Point on his 99th birthday and who was evolving, learning, and questioning throughout his lifetime, would have deeply appreciated the wisdom of Richard Buckminster Fuller. As do I. May we all choose our teachers wisely. - Molly



 Quotes and Wisdom of Richard Buckminster Fuller

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.

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.

War is the ultimate tool of politics. 

To expose a 4.2 Trillion dollar ripoff of the American people by the stockholders of the 1000 largest corporations over the last one-hundred years will be a tall order of business.


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

It is essential to release humanity from the false fixations of yesterday which seem now to bind it to a rationale of action leading only to extinction. 

We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief.... In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding.

Ignorance and greed are part of the evolutionary process, which is just to say that mistakes are part of learning. There is nothing bad about behaviors or perceptions that do not work; they simply have to be given up and replaced by behaviors or perceptions that do work.

We must progress to the stage of doing all the right things for all the right reasons instead of doing all the right things for all the wrong reasons.   

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It is a mater of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry.

Mistakes are great, the more I make the smarter I get.

If I ran a school, I'd give the average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers, for being good parrots. I'd give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they learned from them.

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.

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.

As long as one human being is hungry, the entire human race is hungry.  

If humans are not required to earn a living to be provided survival needs, many are going to want very much to be productive, but not at those tasks they did not choose to do but were forced to accept in order to earn money. Instead, humans will spontaneously take upon themselves those tasks that world society really needs to have done.

When individuals join in a cooperative venture, the power generated far exceeds what they could have accomplished acting individually. 

You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. The significance of you will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all you experience to highest advantage to others. Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.

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

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

You can rest assured that if you devote your time and attention to the highest advantage of others, the Universe will support you, always and only in the nick of time. 

Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren't any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn't be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life's challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person.

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