R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes

We live in this era that has benefited from the Industrial Revolution, and we live with a kind of luxury and plenty that even all but the poorest of Americans live with a kind of sensuousness that was unimagined by medieval kings. But in order to get to this point, a lot of people had to suffer in really terrible ways.

Prosperity in human society is misunderstood. The difference between a rich and poor society is the number of problems that society solves for its citizens. That means technological innovation is the source of all prosperity, but with every tech innovation, you also get disruption - ultimately, social and civic disruption.

We plow new fields, we open new mines, we found new cities, we girdle the land with iron roads and lace the air with telegraph wires. We add knowledge to knowledge and utilize invention after invention. Yet it becomes no easier for the masses of our people to make a living. On the contrary, it is becoming harder.

The world isn't set up equally, and the first billion people using Facebook have way more money than the rest of the world combined.

The concentration of income inside the United States is striking, but it pales in comparison with the concentration worldwide to which the economic system headed by the United States has given rise.

Isn't it strange that as technology advances, the quality of life frequently declines.

National cultures and heritages must compete for man's attention with the mind-absorbing advances of universal science.

We have more billionaires than any country but the United States. And Putin can imprison any one of them at a moment’s notice. Do you think he is poor?

What does peace mean in a world in which the combined wealth of the world's 587 billionaires exceeds the combined gross domestic product of the world's 135 poorest countries?

The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.

Davos is where billionaires tell millionairs what middle class people think.

I always like to say, Bill Clinton created more millionaires and billionaires than any president, but you know what, more people moved out of poverty. Middle-class income - all-time high.

The trends that are shaping the twenty-first-century world embody both promise and peril. Globalization, for example, has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty while contributing to social fragmentation and a massive increase in inequality, not to mention serious environmental damage.

Up to now, economic development has always meant that people, instead of doing something, are enabled to buy it... Economic development has also meant that, after a time, people must buy the commodity because the conditions under which they could get along without it had disappeared from their physical, social, or cultural environment.

Trump would have been unelectable were it not for the groundwork laid by Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, two liberal heroes.

Automation provides us with wondrous increases of production and information, but does it tell us what to do with the men the machines displace? Modern industry gives us the capacity for unparalleled wealth - but where is our capacity to make that wealth meaningful to the poor of every nation?

It's true that globalization, with all its fantastic improvements in the world and the technological progress linked to it, has increased inequality at country level, especially inside countries. And there are people that were left behind - people, sectors, regions - that has created a sense of frustration in the rust belts of the world.

While Donald Trump believes in huge tax breaks for billionaires, he believes that states should actually have the right to lower the minimum wage below $7.25. What an outrage!

It's important that we elevate and primarily focus on the rights of American citizens, but it's also important that we don't forget, 95 percent of the world's population lives beyond our own borders.

The Conservative party now exists largely to misinform the public, to convince voters struggling through austerity that they have the same interests as billionaires and corporations.

The annual 'Forbes' Billionaires List speaks volumes about the movement and concentration of wealth across industries and geographies.

All of my peers were becoming bajillionaires. There was no one from college left in the temp force.

The average worker in 2015 wanting to attain the average living standard in 1915 could do so by working just 17 weeks a year, one third of the time. But most people don't choose to do that. They are willing to work hard to harvest the technological bounty that is available to them. Material abundance has never eliminated perceived scarcity.

I grew up in the Middle East, and I worry that AI increases the socioeconomic divide as opposed to closing the gap.

One way to understand human progress is to look at how technology has made products and services - once reserved for the elite - progressively more accessible and affordable.