R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes

I think it's possible for me to approach the whole problem with a broader scope.When you look at something through an, an organizational eye, whether it's a, a religious organization, political organization, or a civic organization, if you look at it only through the eye of that organization, you see what the organization wants you to see. But you lose your ability to be objective.

Thinking is one of the most important weapons in dealing with problems

We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.

I've used Twitter now and again to try to figure something out; it's an amazing resource. But I think you have to use it judiciously: it's a self-selected group, so it's important not to start thinking of it as the whole world.

This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits.

There is plenty of time to argue with new ideas later. They key is to take careful notes first and debate second.

I think it's important that you always transform if you can. That's what I was trained to do. You try and hide yourself as much as you can - that's the key to longevity.

Often in life, the most important question we can ask ourselves is: do we really have the problem we think we have?

For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects.

Learn to use your brain power. Critical thinking is the key to creative problem solving in business.

I don't watch TV. I think that tends to polarize us and diminish important issues.

Being busy is a form of laziness - lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.

I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

Critiquing relieves you of the responsibility of doing integrative thinking.

A specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded.

Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.

I dont agree with those who think that the conflict is simply between two religions, namely Christianity and Islam... To me, the key conflict is between irrational blind faith and rational, logical minds.

People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.

'What is' is more important than 'what should be.' Too many people are looking at 'what is' from a position of thinking 'what should be'.

The eye goes blind when it only wants to see why.

I think, if you spend a day or - as many people do - a life working only with that aspect of your being, the cerebrum connected to a finger, I feel that the rest of you atrophies, essentially.

If I tell the audience what they should think, then I am robbing them of their own imagination and their own capacity of deciding what's important to them.

There are little details in everything you do, and if you get away from any one of the little details, you're not teaching the thing as a whole. For it is little things which, together, make the whole. This, I think, is extremely important.

I do think it's important not to be absolutely sure, so sure that you can't reinvent yourself in some way, or at least rediscover the truth of why you think what you think, and not just take it as an assumption.

The most important step in getting a job done is the recognition of the problem. Once I recognize a problem I usually can think of someone who can work it out better than I could.