Dare to be naïve.

Don’t fight forces, use them.
[His motto of the early thirties.]

How much does your building weigh?
A question often used to challenge architects to consider how efficiently materials were used for the space enclosed.

I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.

I look for what needs to be done. … After all, that’s how the universe designs itself.

Nature never “fails.” Nature complies with its own laws. Nature is the law. When Man lacks understanding of Nature’s laws and a Man-contrived structure buckles unexpectedly, it does not fail. It only demonstrates that Man did not understand Nature’s laws and behaviors. Nothing failed. Man’s knowledge or estimating was inadequate.

Realistic thinking accrues only after mistake making, which is the cosmic wisdom's most cogent way of teaching each of us how to carry on.

The National Science Foundation asked the great “breakthrough” scientists what they felt to be the most dominantly favorable factor in their educational experience. The answer was almost uniformly, “Intimate association with a great, inspiring teacher.”

We speak erroneously of “artificial” materials, “synthetics”, and so forth. The basis for this erroneous terminology is the notion that Nature has made certain things which we call natural, and everything else is “man-made”, ergo artificial. But what one learns in chemistry is that Nature wrote all the rules of structuring; man does not invent chemical structuring rules; he only discovers the rules. All the chemist can do is find out what Nature permits, and any substances that are thus developed or discovered are inherently natural. It is very important to remember that.

What the scientists have always found by physical experiment was an a priori orderliness of nature, or Universe always operating at an elegance level that made the discovering scientist’s working hypotheses seem crude by comparison. The discovered reality made the scientists’ exploratory work seem relatively disorderly.

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty … but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

World Game finds that 60 percent of all the jobs in the U.S.A. are not producing any real wealth—i.e., real life support. They are in fear-underwriting industries or are checking-on-other-checkers, etc.

The amoeba had the architectural ideas of R. Buckminster Fuller before there was anyone around capable of having an idea.

In design, people like Buckminster Fuller amazed me at the levels at which he could think. He could think molecularly. And he could think at the almost galactic scale. And the idea that somebody could actually talk about molecules and talk about buildings and structures and talk about space just amazed me. As I get older–I’ll be 60 next year–what I’ve discovered is that I find myself in those three realms too.