CJ Fearnley's Favorite Quotes and Poems


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77 of my favorite quotes matched the search for "Fuller".

Dare to be naïve.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see
need to be done, and 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.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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All of humanity now has the option to "make it" successfully and
sustainably, by virtue of our having minds, discovering principles and
being able to employ these principles to do more with less.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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My own working assumption of why we are here is that we are here as
local-Universe information-gatherers and that we are given access to the
divine design principles so that we can therefrom objectively invent
instruments and tools -- e.g., the microscope and the telescope --
with which to extend all sensorial inquiring regarding the rest of
the to-the-naked-eye-invisible, micro-macro Universe, because human
beings, tiny though we are, are here for all the local-Universe
information-harvesting and cosmic-principle-discovering, objective
tool-inventing, and local-environment-controlling as local Universe
problem-solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative
Universe.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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It is not for me to change you. The question is, how can I be of service
to you without diminishing your degrees of freedom?

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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We have reached the point where we are now possessed of sufficient
information for each individual human to dare to exercise the option
to ``make it'' rather than having to depend on the decisions of an
educated elite.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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We are most probably here for local information-gathering and
local-Universe problem-solving in support of the integrity of eternally
regenerative Universe.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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   Cosmic Plurality
by R. Buckminster Fuller

Environment to each must be
All there is, that isn't me.
Universe in turn must be
All that isn't me AND ME.

Since I only see inside of me
What brain imagines outside me,
It seems to be you may be me.
If that is so, there's only we.

Me and we, too
Which love makes three,
Universe
Perme-embracing
It-Them-You-and-We.

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I live on Earth at present,
and I don't know what I am.
I know that I am not a category.
I am not a thing -- a noun.
I seem to be a verb,
an evolutionary process --
an integral function of the universe.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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There is something patently insane about all the typewriters sleeping
with all the beautiful plumbing in the beautiful office buildings --
and all the people sleeping in the slums.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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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?

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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In the United States, throughout all 24 hours of every day of the year -- year
after year -- we have an average of 2,000,000 automobiles standing in front of
red stoplights with their engines going, the energy for which amounts to that
generated by the full efforts of 200 million horses being completely wasted as
they jump up and down going nowhere.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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War is the ultimate tool of politics. Political leaders look out only for
their own side. Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next
election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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The most important fact about Spaceship Earth:
an instruction manual didn't come with it.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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Since it is now physically and metaphysically demonstrable that the chemical
elements resources of Earth already mined or in recirculation, plus the
knowledge we now have, are adequate to the support of all humanity and can be
feasibly redesign-employed [...] to support all humanity at a higher standard
of living than ever before enjoyed by any human, war is now and henceforth
murder. All weapons are invalid. Lying is intolerable. All politics are not
only obsolete but lethal.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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[Design Science is] the effective application of the principles of science to
the conscious design of our total environment in order to help make the
Earth's finite resources meet the needs of all humanity without disrupting the
ecological processes of the planet.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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You can't better the world by simply talking of or to it. Philosophy
to be effective must be mechanically applied.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller, 4D Timelock (1928), Chapter 5

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Wasting time is exactly the same as gold used to be. Therefore we are forced
to design and figure in the fourth dimension which is time.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller, 4D Timelock (1928), Chapter 7

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

--R. Buckminster Fuller

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

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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Don't fight forces, use them

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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Either you're going to go along with your mind
and the truth, or you're going to yield to fear 
and custom and conditioned reflexes.

With our minds alone we can discover
those principles we need to employ to convert
all humanity to success in a new, harmonious
relationship with the universe.

We have the option to make it.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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Don't try to make me consistent. I am learning all the time.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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There is no energy crisis, food crisis or environmental crisis.
There is only a crisis of ignorance.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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If the Success or Failure of this Planet, and of Human Beings,
Depended on How I Am and What I Do,
How Would I Be? What Would I Do?

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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When I'm working on a problem, I never think about Beauty, I think only how to
solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful,
I know it is wrong.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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Revolution by design and invention is the only revolution tolerable to
all men, all societies, all political systems anywhere.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller "Geosocial Revolution", 1965 (in "Utopia or Oblivion" 1969)
    Also appears in "Report on the 'Geosocial Revolution'" Saturday Review 16 September 1967

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Love is omni-inclusive,
Progressively exquisite,
Understanding and tender
And compassionately attuned
To other than self.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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

--Buckminster Fuller.

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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.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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The more we learn the more we realize how little we know.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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Human integrity is the uncompromising courage of self-determining whether
or not to take initiatives, support or co-operate with others, in accord
with all the truth and nothing but the truth, as conceived by the divine
mind, always available in each individual.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments
with unexpected outcomes.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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

--- Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)

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There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you its going to be a butterfly.

--- Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)

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Design science is more than the application of engineering and
technology. It is more than a plan or a design. Design science means
the total responsibility and capability for development, production,
and distribution - of not just a product - but a total service system
on a worldwide basis.

--- Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)

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We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.
[The challenge is] to make the world work for 100% of humanity in
the shortest possible time, with spontaneous cooperation and without
ecological damage or disadvantage of anyone.

--- Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)

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I only learn what to do when I have failures.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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How can we make the world work for 100 percent of humanity in the shortest
possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage
or disadvantage to anyone?

--- Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)

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I learned very early and painfully that you have to decide at the outset
whether you are trying to make money or to make sense, as they are mutually
exclusive.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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Whether we are able to be a complete success or failure is in such
critical balance that every smallest human test of integrity every
smallest moment-to-moment decision tips the scales affirmatively or
negatively.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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We humans are manifestly here for problem-solving and, if we are any good
at problem-solving, we don't come to utopia, we come to more difficult
problems to solve.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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Status quo
Is a multidimensional tapestry
Of what has been
And will never be again.
And is, ipso facto,
No longer existent.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller, And It Came To Pass --- Not To Stay, p. 131

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I am quite confident that if in the evolutionary processes we deliberately
attempt direct personal exploitation of the economic advantages accruing
to our personal scientific explorations, we inadvertently become
precoccupied and prejudiced with the item we have to sell and are no
longer free to explore scientifically with a wholesome intellectual
integrity."

--- Buckminster Fuller, Education Automation

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In my viewpoint, there is no meaning to the word "artificial." Man can
only do what nature permits him to do. Man does not invent anything.
He makes discoveries of principles operative in nature and often finds
ways of generalizing those principles and reapplying them in surprise
directions. That is called invention. But he does not do anything
artificial. Nature has to permit it, and if nature permits it, it
is natural. There is naught which is unnatural.

--- Buckminster Fuller, Education Automation

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

--- Buckminster Fuller

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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.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1963

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In its complexities of design integrity, the Universe is technology.
The technology evolved by man is thus far amateurish compared to the
elegance of nonhumanly contrived regeneration. Man does not spontaneously
recognize technology other than his own, so he speaks of the rest as
something he ignorantly calls nature.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics

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The importance of man in the next generation of technical research is very
much greater than in the previous. The computer cannot ask an original
question. The computer can only reask questions which were originally asked
by the human brain. No computer can apprehend the plurality of potentially
significant patterns newly emergent in evolution. Men will continue and
flourish as the great question askers and exploratory inventors.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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Our Universe is finite but nonsimultaneously conceptual: a moving-picture
scenario of nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping events. One single
picture---one frame---does not tell the story. The single-frame picture of a
caterpillar does not foretell or imply the transformation of that creature,
first, into the chrysalis stage and, much later, into the butterfly phase
of its life. Nor does one picture of a butterfly tell the viewer that the
butterfly can fly.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics 322.01 

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I'm not trying to imitate nature, I'm trying to find the principles she's using.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller

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Buckminster Fuller's complex relationship to Biomimetics:

"The development of synergetics did not commence with the study of these
structures of nature, seeking to understand their logic. ... I did not copy
nature's structural patterns. ... I began to explore structure and develop it
in pure mathematical principle, out of which the patterns emerged in pure
principle and developed themselves in pure principle. I then realized those
developed structural principles as physical forms and, in due course, applied
them to practical tasks."

--- R. Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics, 203.09
http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s02/p0000.html#203.09

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There is no single building block---there are only complexes of complex systems.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, p. 7

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The words "artificial" and "failure" are meaningless, for what they
aver is experimentally "nonexistent." If Nature permits a formulation it
is natural.  If Nature's laws of behavior do not permit the formulation,
the latter does not occur. Whatever can be done or occurs is natural,
no matter how grotesque, bor ing, unfamiliar, or unprecedented.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller, "How Little I Know" Saturday Review 12 November 1966

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Nature never "fails." Nature complies with its own laws. Nature is the
law. When Man lacks understanding of Nature's laws and a Man-contrived
structure buckles unexpectedly, it does not fail. It only demonstrates
that Man did not understand Nature's laws and behaviors. Nothing failed,
Man's knowledge or estimating was inadequate.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller, "How Little I Know" Saturday Review 12 November 1966

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Science is the earnest attempt to set in order the facts of experience.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller cites Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans (Critical
Path, p. 43) with this quote. However both citations appear incorrect.
Extensive searching on-line suggest that neither Eddington nor Jeans
ever gave such a definition. But more research may yet identify a
source passage.

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[T]he individual must plunge earnestly and dedicatedly into initiating
self-development using the resources of the educational system.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller, "Critical Path", p. 237

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What was I thinking about before I was first told, convincingly, that
I had to 'earn a living' by doing what someone else said I had to do?

--- R. Buckminster Fuller, "Critical Path", p. 266

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The world can be made to work successfully for all, and we know how to do it.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller in "Geosocial Revolution" in "Utopia or Oblivion"

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"I left Earth three times. I found no place else to go. Please take care of Spaceship Earth."

-- Wally Schirra, Apollo astronaut, quoted in "Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for the Millennium" p. 405

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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.

-- R. Buckminster Fuller, https://www.facebook.com/BuckminsterFullerInstitute/photos/a.139494043585/10157106285078586/

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Initiative springs only from within the individual. Initiative can neither
be created nor delegated. It can only be vacated. Initiative can only be
taken by the individual on his own self-conviction of the necessity to
overcome his conditioned reflexing which has accustomed him theretofore
always to yield authority to the wisdom of others. Initiative is only
innate and highly perishable.

-- R. Buckminster Fuller, "Geosocial Revolution" 1965 (in Utopia or Oblivion, 1969)

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In the big picture, I see man [sic.] as the first living species to
consciously participate in the alteration of his ecological patterning,
and I see that he has done this by the development of tools.

-- R. Buckminster Fuller, "How to Maintain Man [sic.] as a Success in Universe",
   1965 (in Utopia or Oblivion, 1969)

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In order to be able to develop the total complex of humanity's
ever-improvingly efficient capabilities, we must attain increasingly
swift access to all the resources of the planet and eventually of the
universe at large of earth and of the solar system and of the universe
beyond and within.

-- R. Buckminster Fuller, "How to Maintain Man [sic.] as a Success in Universe",
   1965 (in Utopia or Oblivion, 1969)

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[A] problem adequately stated is a problem fundamentally ripe and potential of
solution.

-- R. Buckminster Fuller, "Design Strategy" 1966 (in Utopia or Oblivion, 1969)

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A new, physically uncompromised, metaphysical initiative of unbiased
integrity could unify the world.

--- Buckminster Fuller in "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" 

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You and I can go out and take a sunbath, but are unable to take in enough
energy through our skins to keep alive.

--- Buckminster Fuller in "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" 

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We have not been seeing our Spaceship Earth as an integrally-designed
machine which to be persistently successful must be comprehended and
serviced in total.

--- Buckminster Fuller in "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" 

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One of humanity's prime drives is to understand and be understood.

--- Buckminster Fuller in "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth"

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All of this reminds me of the importance of Bucky Fuller's "systems
thinking," a concept that considers our connectedness to natural systems,
including the planet, our shared resources, and each other---people
who were once out of sight and out of mind, but who now face us every
night on the evening news or anytime on our iPhones, iPads, and other
conveyors of instant information.

Charles and Ray Eameses' 1977 film "Powers of Ten" gave me an
idea. I came up with the Cycle of Responsibility---my own Powers
of Five. Responsibility starts with yourself, then extends to your
profession, your client, your community, your planet. Like Fuller's
systems thinking, these five layers form a system, too. If you remove
any of the layers, your responsible behavior collapses. But when one
layer supports another and that one the next layer, and so on, then you
have a system of human accountability that is broad and sustaining.

--- Susan S. Szenasy, "Szenasy, design advocate"

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Original questions of computers or humans probably are always products of
unexpected interferences.

--- R. Buckminster Fuller in "The Music of the New Life" in "Utopia or Oblivion"

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Specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.

--- Buckminster Fuller in "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth"

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Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable, and
desirable. Yet in observing a little child, we find it is interested in
everything and spontaenously apprehends, comprehends, and co-ordinates
an ever-expanding inventory of experiences. ... Nothing seems to be more
prominent about human life than its wanting to understand all and put
everything together.

--- Buckminster Fuller in "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth"

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automation displaces the automatons

--- Buckminster Fuller in "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth"

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Our children and their children are our future days. If we do not
comprehend and realize our potential ability to support all life forever
we are cosmicly bankrupt.

R. Buckminster Fuller in "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth"

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Words are tools

R. Buckminster Fuller in "Critical Path", p. xxxviii


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Author Information

Contact the author at cjf@CJFearnley.com. View the author's home page at https://www.CJFearnley.com/.