Buckle Quotes (5 quotes)
Geology ... offers always some material for observation. ... [When] spring and summer come round, how easily may the hammer be buckled round the waist, and the student emerge from the dust of town into the joyous air of the country, for a few delightful hours among the rocks.
In The Story of a Boulder: or, Gleanings from the Note-book of a Field Geologist (1858), viii.
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.
In "How Little I Know", in Saturday Review (12 Nov 1966), 152. Excerpted in Buckminster Fuller and Answar Dil, Humans in Universe (1983), 31.
The Himalayas are the crowning achievement of the Indo-Australian plate. India in the Oligocene crashed head on into Tibet, hit so hard that it not only folded and buckled the plate boundaries but also plowed into the newly created Tibetan plateau and drove the Himalayas five and a half miles into the sky. The mountains are in some trouble. India has not stopped pushing them, and they are still going up. Their height and volume are already so great they are beginning to melt in their own self-generated radioactive heat. When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in a warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as 20,000 feet below the sea floor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth.
If by some fiat, I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence; this is the one I would choose: the summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone.
If by some fiat, I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence; this is the one I would choose: the summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone.
Annals of the Former World
We cannot but think there is something like a fallacy in Mr. Buckle’s theory that the advance of mankind is necessarily in the direction of science, and not in that of morals.
In 'Dante', The Writings of James Russell Lowell: Literary Essays (1890), 254. [The reclusive Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862) began writing his History of Civilization, trying to construct a science of society on the basis of inductions from history. —Webmaster]
We rest in the immense and complete order of the earth. And then it may well happen that what we have been seeing as beautiful repose changes into motions; lines seem to rise and fall, surfaces wave and swing. Folding, which long ago buckled horizontal strata into huge subterranean waves of stone (folds) is revived. The rounded crests of folds rise and fall rhythmically. Giant smoking volcanoes stand in a row like the pipes of a cosmic organ through which the earth’s mighty breath blows its roaring music. Granite domes in the deserts, the broadly arched shields of the Rocky Mountains become the chimes waiting only for the earthquake’s stroke to awaken the mighty symphony that drowns out all human tones and resounds throughout the world.
In 'Prologue', Conversation with the Earth (1954), 4. As translated by E.B. Garside from Gespräch mit der Erde (1947).
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
