R Buckminster Fuller - Collected Quotes

"Relativity is inherently convergent, though convergent toward a plurality of centers of abstract truths. Degrees of accuracy are only degrees of refinement and magnitude in no way affects the fundamental reliability, which refers, as directional or angular sense, toward centralized truths. Truth is a relationship." (R Buckminster Fuller, "The Designers and the Politicians", 1962)

"Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system's separate parts or any subassembly of the system's parts." (R Buckminster Fuller, "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth", 1963)

"Topology provides the synergetic means of ascertaining the values of any system of experiences. Topology is the science of fundamental pattern and structural relationships of event constellations." (R Buckminster Fuller, "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth", 1963)

"A problem adequately stated is a problem well on its way to being solved." (R Buckminster Fuller, "I Seem to be a Verb", 1970)

"Lack of knowledge concerning all the factors and the failure to include them in our integral imposes false conclusions." (R Buckminster Fuller, "Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking", 1975)

"Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately." (R Buckminster Fuller, "Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking", 1975)

"We must start with scientific fundamentals, and that means with the data of experiments and not with assumed axioms predicated only upon the misleading nature of that which only superficially seems to be obvious. It is the consensus of great scientists that science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience." (R Buckminster Fuller, "Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking", 1975)

"Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment." (R Buckminster Fuller, [Interview in the Minneapolis Tribune] 1978)

"Whatever humans have learned had to be learned as a consequence only of trial and error experience. Humans have learned only through mistakes. Buckminster Fuller, "R Buckminster Fuller on education", 1979)

"It seems that truth is progressive approximation in which the relative fraction of our spontaneously tolerated residual error constantly diminishes." (R Buckminster Fuller, "Humans in Universe", 1983)

"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)