Tao Te Ching
Buckminster Fuller
1895 – 1983 CE
“One of the greatest minds of our times," pioneering solution-solver doing "more with less,” poet, engineering and inventor-genius with 25 patents; Bucky developed a comprehensive and practical perspective on ways to solve world problems. Expelled from Harvard in 1913 and also in 1915 (he later received 47 honorary doctorate degrees) and on the verge of suicide in 1927 when his construction company failed, he went into a 2-year reclusive retreat emerging as one of our greatest global thinkers. His inventions include a winch to rescue boats, a way to better produce concrete buildings, the World Game, the Dymaxion™ house, car, bathroom, grain bin, and many as well as the geodesic dome with now more than 300,000 in use everywhere from African villages to remote radar stations to children’s playgrounds. Advocate of "a one-town world,” seeing ourselves on "spaceship earth,” and the world as one living system; he inspired tens of thousands of sustainability pioneers.
Lineages
American (USA) Business Humanism
Eras
Western
Post-Romantic Age (1850 – 2018 CE)Great Depression (1929 – 1941 CE)
Roaring Twenties (1920 – 1929 CE)
Generations
The Lost Generation (1883 – 1900 CE)Quotes by Buckminster Fuller (21 quotes)
“Specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the ‘expert’ is fooled into accepting a slavery.”
Chapters:
12. This Over That
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“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.”
Chapters:
13. Honor and Disgrace
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“Traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.”
Chapters:
17. True Leaders
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“Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his co-ordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.”
Chapters:
28. Turning Back
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“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.”
Chapters:
36. The Small, Dark Light
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“Mistakes are great, the more I make the smarter I get.”
Chapters:
43. No Effort, No Trace
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“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.”
Chapters:
55. Forever Young
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“All the present bureaucracies of political governments, great religious organizations, and all big businesses find that physical success for all humanity would be devastating to the perpetuation of their ongoing activities.”
Chapters:
58. Goals Without Means
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“The minute you choose to do what you really want to do, it's a different kind of life.”
Chapters:
65. Simplicity: the Hidden Power of Goodness
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“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.”
Chapters:
72. Helpful Fear
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“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.”
Chapters:
72. Helpful Fear
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“We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors.”
Chapters:
72. Helpful Fear
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“If you think in terms of people divided up into countries, you won't follow me. The idea of countries is going by the boards. Young people are getting wonderfully uprooted and they're too strong to get sucked into this 'country' crap.”
Chapters:
78. Water
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“How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”
Chapters:
80. A Golden Age
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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.”
Chapters:
81. Journey Without Goal
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“Racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy.”
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“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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“Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing… after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked.”
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“We as an economic society are going to have to pay our whole population to go to school and pay it to stay at school.”
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“In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.”
Chapters:
29. Not Doing
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