Quotes from Critical Path, by Buckminster Fuller


- “I m confident that if I were born under the same circumstances as any other known humans, I would have behaved much as they have.”
- [e.e cummings] “wrote a piece called “A Poet’s Advice”, which I feel elucidates why ‘little I,’ fifty-three years ago at age thirty-two, jettisoned all that I had ever been taught to believe and proceeded thereafter to reason and act only on the basis of direct personal experience.”
- “Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.”
            - e.e cummings
- “In the United States, throughout all twenty-four hours of every day of the year – year after year – we have an average of two million automobiles standing in front of red stoplights with their engines going, the energy for which amounts to that generated by the full efforts of 200 million horses being completely wasted as they jump up and down going nowhere.” [1981]
- A surface-area issue: “One two-mile diameter dome enclosing all the mid-Manhattan buildings between Twenty-second and Sixty-second streets and between the Hudson and East rivers, having a surface that is only one eighty-fourth that of all the buildings now standing in that midtown area, would reduce the heating and cooling energy requirements of that area eighty-four fold.”
- “With the highest aeronautical and engineering facilities of the world redirected from weaponry to livingry production, all humanity would have the option of becoming enduringly successful.”
- “Now is the time for the comprehensive architectural profession to reorient itself from the six-months-per-one-residence work schedule to the millions-per-day, air-deliverable, sewer-and-water-mains-emancipated, energy-harvesting, dwelling-machine-production world with its unpurchasable, air-deliverable dwelling machines only rentable from a Hertz-Hilton-Bell-Tel service industry, able to accommodate at unprecedently high standards of living all humanity’s remote-from-one-another living accommodations.”
- “One would hope the at-home-staying humans will start thinking – “What was I thinking about when they told me I had to ‘earn my living’ – doing what someone else had decided needed to be done? What do I see that needs to be done that nobody else is attending to? What do I need to learn to be effective in attending to it in a highly efficient and inoffensive-to-others manner?”
- “The nearest each of us can come to God is by loving the truth.”
- “In speaking of truth we are not talking about the position to take that seems to put you in the most favorable light.”
- “Whenever you come to a word with which you are not familiar, find it in the dictionary and write a sentence which uses that new word.”
- “The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done – that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.”
- “It is evidenced that throughout all earlier times until yesterday, the ruling social powers assumed the human masses to be universally ignorant and accredited them with having only muscle and dexterity value.”
àhe argues that simply by following currents, Phoenicians circumnavigated in 200BC…see map p. 36
- “The emperor-pope could tell his people how to behave, how to gain God’s favor.”
- “ ‘Our side’ is natural and right – ‘God’s country’ – and vice versa.”
- [in 200BC] “Nonrural, nonmilitary humans had words and mathematical tools and writing ability with which to initiate a breakthrough toward ultimate emancipation of all humans… Humans had found that each one had a private “hotline” to God… Herein lies the source of the Church’s persistent maintenance of its dogma and authority in the face of technologically emergent and potentially powerful humanity.”
- “But instinctively the king says secretly to himself, “I mustn’t ever allow two of those big guys to come at me together. I can lick anyone of them, but only one by one.” The most important initial instinct of the most powerful individual or of his organized power structure is, “Divide to conquer, and to keep conquered, keep divided.”          
- “The way the power structure keeps the wit and cunning of the intelligentsia…from making trouble for the power structures is to make each one a specialist with tools and an office or lab. That is exactly why bright people today have become streamlined to specialists.”
- “To the [American] Indians it was obvious that humans could not own the land.”
- “I do not know. Our ways are different from your ways. The sight of your cities pains the eyes of the red man. There is no quiet place in the white man’s cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring or the rustle of the insect’s wings. The clutter only seems to insult the ears. And what is there to life if a man cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or the arguments of the frogs across the pond at night?”
                        - Chief Seattle, 1851
- “A thousand years later the Crusaders – ostensibly fighting for holy reasons – were the Indian Ocean-Phoenician-Venetian-Veeking water-borne power structure fighting the older over land-Khyber Pass power structure over mastery of the trade route between Asia and Europe.”
- “Up until 1500BC all money was cattle, lambs, goats, or pigs – live money that was real life-support wealth, wealth you could actually eat.”   
- word “capital” comes from a head of cattle – “capita” = head (Latin)
àthe concept of interest “in kind” originated from the calves of collateralized cows; “kind” means “child” in German
- “The most visible of the power-structure identities was the East India Company, an entirely private enterprise whose flag as adopted by Queen Elizabeth in 1600 happened to have thirteen red and white horizontal stripes with a blue rectangle in its upper left hand corner.”
- “In early 1933 there came one day in which 5000 banks closed their doors to stop ‘the run’ on their funds.”
à The Roman Catholic Church is the world’s largest real estate owner.
- “Among the first of the New Deal’s emergency arts of 1933 was the establishment of the Works Progress Administration, which provided jobs for approximately anyone who wanted them – artists, mathematicians, etc., as well as all white- and blue-collar workers, and, of course, all day laborers and such.”
- “What the New Deal did in fact was to socialize the prime contractor corporations instead of the people. This kid the fact of socialism from the world in general.”
- “The big oil companies knew long ago that humanity would ultimately run out of an adequate supply of petroleum and other fossil fuels, through coal may last a thousand years. That’s why, by the means we have reviewed, the oil companies acquired control of the know-how on atomic energy as well as all the atomic plants and equipment paid for originally by the USA government. The power structure’s only interest is in selling energy – and only energy that can run through a meter. They’re not in the least interested in anyone getting windpower – except themselves.”
- “The great oil companies control it all. In general they and noncommunist Arabia are one and the same. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) officialdom, regardless of national political differences, is very probably run entirely by the oil corporations’ trillions of dollars of persuasiveness.”
à he argues the Arabians hit a liquid gold mine, and were thrown into a world economy they didn’t understand
- “…thus producing the first war in history in which both sides and all their allies would lose. To be a survivor of such a war would be worse than being killed by it. Planet Earth would be humanely untenable.”
- “In 1927, at age thirty-two, finding myself a “throwaway” in the business world, I sought to use myself as my scientific “guinea pig” (my most objectively considered research “subject”) in a lifelong experiment designed to discover what – if anything – a healthy young male human of average size, experience, and capability with an economically dependent wife and newborn child, starting without capital or any kind of wealth, cash savings, account monies, credit, or university degree, could effectively do that could not be done by great nations or great private enterprise.”
- “I sought to do my own thinking, confining it to only experientially gained information, and with the products of my own thinking and intuition to articulate my own innate motivational integrity instead of trying to accommodate everyone else’s opinions, credos, educational theories, romances, and mores, as I had in my earlier life.”
- “The fact that the individual who did pursue this course as a deliberate experiment (myself) found that it proved to be an economically tenable way of life and a technically effective way of approaching world problems may encourage others to address problems in the same manner.”
- “I am not a thing – a noun. I am not flesh. At eighty-five I have taken in over a thousand tons of air, food, and water, which temporarily because my flesh and which progressively disassociated from me. You and I seem to be verbs – evolutionary processes. Are we not integral functions of the Universe?”
- “The first important regenerative effect upon me of keeping this active chronological record was that I learned to ‘see myself’ as others might – and usually did – see me.”
- “When my subject is being effective, I am glad, and when it is worried by procrastinating, I am sad. When it makes mistakes, I learn the most and am elated. That is the extent of my prejudice.”
- “the also universally assumed law of ‘survival only of the fittest’ had given historical rise to various political ideologies, as ways of coping with this fundamental inadequacy.”
àhe notes this is untrue, because there is plenty in the world for everybody
- “I was hopeful of finally doing so much with so little as to implement comprehensive and economically sustainable physical success for all humanity, thereby to eliminate the need for lethally biased politics.”
- “I assumed that nature would “evaluate” my work as I went along. If I was doing what nature wanted done… I would find my work being economically sustained.”
- “only the “impossible” continued to happen.” à he was able to earn money, to live, like this!
- “I have proven that an individual can be world-effective while eschewing either money or political advantage-making.”
- “Acknowledging the mathematically elegant intellectual integrity of eternally regenerative Universe is one way of identifying God.”
- “More often theologists or others discover principles [truths] but do not subject them to the rigorous physical-special-case testing before accepting them and employing them as working-assumption principles.”
- he wants “sunrise” and “sunset” to be replaced by “sunsight” and “sunclipse” to indicate the spherical world
“worldwide” vs. “world-around”
- “it turned out at the end of the conference that all the Russians could speak English, while amongst the USA representatives only the two Harvard professors could speak Russian.”
- “big oil money, which successfully lobbied Washington’s Capitol Hill energy policies – knowing that petroleum would ultimately be exhausted – fostered atomic-warhead production in order to built up the atomic technology industry (in the development of which the US people’s government has spent over $200 billion)”
- ‘One of the factors that they failed to envision was that of the technology becoming ever lighter per unit of functional performance until it because feasibly and economically air-deliverable.’
- “The Heartland – Afghanistan and its ultimate access to the Indian Ocean – is the historic prizes [sic] of the world’s top power position.”
- “Possibly the electronically operative democracy and its ability to cope with complex problem-solving will also make safe the realization of individual initiative to be exercised on behalf of all humanity by any humans everywhere.”
- “Experience teaches us that every time we employ our metaphysical know-what and know-how wealth, we always learn more.”
- “The quantity of physical, cosmic energy wealth as radiation arriving aboard planet earth each minute is greater than all the energy used annually by all humanity.”
- “There can be no planetary equity until all the sovereign nations are abolished and we have but one accounting system – that of the one family of humans aboard Spaceship Earth.”
- “Ample food and growing capacity exist on our planet to feed well every world human.”
- “Scrap of the discontinued hardware constitutes new high-grade ore mines existing entirely above ground.”
- “World resource maps showing only the tin-in-ground mines are completely misinforming. World war gaming and the economic advisers of leading government use only the in-the-ground-mine data.”
- “Birthrates decrease at exactly the same rate that the per capita consumption of inanimate electrical energy increases.”
- “[In 1975] all fifty states have been required by federal regulation to allow individual windmill owners to feed their windpower-generated electric current directly into the local utility power lines.”
- “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.”
- Resources: “Reliably operative and subconsciously sustaining, effectively available twenty-four hours a day, anywhere in the Universe: gravity, love.’
- ‘Human beings traveling away from home with cash in their pockets, thinking fondly of those left behind or soon-to-be-joined loved ones, are hooked by the realistic statuettes of four-year-old girls and boys with upturned faces saying in a cartoon ‘balloon’, ‘What did you bring me, Daddy?’ “
- “This overall and inexorable trending to do more with less is known sum-totally as ‘progressive emphemeralization’. Ephemeralization trends towards an ultimate doing of everything withnothing at all, which is a trend of omniweighable physical to be mastered by the omniweightless metaphysics of intellect.”
- “Killing of the enemy’s people was not their objective. Killing the enemy’s ideology is the objective.”
- “The idea is to make a message of the other’s economy and customs and thus to discredit the other’s political system in the eyes of the rest of the world and to destroy the enemy people’s confidence in their own system.”
- “All the young world-around idealists will have to face up to the question of whether they prefer to keep on agitating simply because they have come to enjoy a sense of power and importance by doing so.”
- “We could say that the more cosmically comprehensive the consideration, the more accurate the prognosticating. I therefore decided to always include the most micro-macro cosmically inclusive data in all my prognosticating.”
- “In wartime the military uses what the scientists developed in peacetime.”
- “In the ‘Self-Disciplines’ chapter of this book, I recounted that the larger the number of humans I undertook to serve, the more effective I became.”
- “In the preceding chapter… I sought to forestall any hesitance on the part of humanity to go ‘for the works’. It is to be everything for everybody or oblivion.”
- ‘…melting all weaponry and using those metals for livingry.’
- ‘All those who have attained high scholarly capability assure us that the only real education is self-education.’
- ‘What you want for everybody, because you can see the total benefits that can accrue, is usually reasonable and technologically gratifiable, and to be realized possibly within your own generation.’
- ‘There is no question about it. It is the refineries, steel and other mills, and the public utility fumes that produce the smog. But no municipal government anywhere in America is going to let its industry go away.’
- ‘The only real reason that auto fumes were previously measurable was that the industrial-fume-laden ceiling held the auto fumes down and locked them in at the level of which you and I are breathing.’
- ‘Companies must install the precipitators or be put out of business. No one will be allowed to put fumes into the sky or noxious chemicals into our waters ever again. We do have the well-proven physical equipment to deal with this problem today.’
- ‘The new range of environment control built lightly and sinuously into airplane enclosures indicates postwar housing solutions distinctly advanced in every standard of performance, yet weighing only a few hundred pounds per capita. Thus postwar human container weights of possibly one-quarter ton per occupant are to be compared with the lightest wall board prefabricated structure of 1942… better than five tons per capita.’
- ‘Any economy, irrespective of the relative quantities of traditionally esteemed elements in its physical resources inventory, can outperform, per capita, any other economy in direct proportion tothe degree of the initial control in planning conceded to science by politics.’
- ‘Cities developed entirely before the thought of electricity or automobiles or before any of the millions of inventions registered in the United States Patent Office. For eminently mobile man, cities have become obsolete.’
- ‘We would interrupt our enclosed space only when we had some service that we needed at that point. There would be no walls or partitions that arbitrarily stopped you from passing through. Space would be broken up only by devices that served you at preferred locations – for instance, by a bathroom or a clothes-storage device.’
- ‘Three-quarters of our planet Earth s covered with water, most of which may float organic cities.’
- ‘We now find that every human being generates a self-surrounding, ultra-ultra-high-frequency electromagnetic field – exquisitely ephemeral but exquisitely real. Each individual’s field alternates between positive and negative. When an individual is feeling predominantly negative mentally, the field is negative, and vice versa.’
- ‘ ‘Life’ itself is entirely metaphysical – a pattern integrity.’
- ‘Our human organisms were designed to initially operate only nakedly and within the tropical-island areas of the Earthian biospheres.’
- ‘During the intervening forty-four years [1936-1980] our knowledge of humans in Universe has been extended from 50,000 years of existence to over three and one-half million. Our knowledge of the number of galaxies has increased from two to over two billion!’

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