R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes

The master of a single trade can support a family. The master of seven trades cannot support himself. The wind is never for the sailor who knows not to what port he is bound.

We can't all do everything.

You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.

It's the thing that you do well that brings you to prominence. The very thing that brings you to success can also be like a curse, because then people think that's all you can do.

I think in society we tend to put ourselves in boxes and corners and restrict ourselves, and we constantly feel the need to not say this or not wear this.

There's that bubble of childhood that makes you innocently do anything. Then, when you get older, that pops, and you're aware of limitations and judgment and social pressures and things like that.

If a man can make typewriters better than anyone else, let us, in the name of common sense, keep him on the job of making typewriters.

I feel like someone is pressing me into a mold that does not fit my body, forcing me intothe wrong shape.

No man on earth is truly free, All are slaves of money or necessity. Public opinion or fear of prosecution forces each one, against his conscience, to conform.

I did a show in New Jersey in the auditorium of a technical high school ... Technical high school, that's where dreams are narrowed down. We tell our children, "You can do anything you want." Their whole lives. "You can do anything!" But this place, we take kids - they're 15, they're young - and we tell them, "You can do eight things. We got it down to eight for you."

It is mediocrity which makes laws and sets mantraps and spring-guns in the realm of free song, saying thus far shalt thou go and no further.

The shoemaker makes a good shoe because he makes nothing else.

A man cannot be professor of zoölogy on one day and of chemistry on the next, and do good work in both. As in a concert all are musicians,-one plays one instrument, and one another, but none all in perfection.

Excellence in one area is the beginning of excellence in every area.

It is not only a troublesome but slavish to be nice [fastidious].

You have to shrink yourself to fit into this little life with him.

Life isn't about trying to be an expert in everything. It's about being an expert in one thing and offering it to the world.

One hour per day of study in your chosen field is all it takes. One hour per day of study will put you at the top of your field within three years. Within five years you'll be a national authority. In seven years, you can be one of the best people in the world at what you do.

And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

Religion becomes a matter of belief, and belief acts as a limitation on the mind; and the mind then is never free.

Always as a musician you must have one thing you do well.

Do a few things at mastery versus many things at mediocrity.

Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The 'expert' is the man who stays put.

Freedom is only granted us that obedience may be more perfect.

The one thing more difficult than following a regime is keeping from imposing it on others.