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Quotes of the day
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Published Thursday, July 12, 2012 @ 6:06 AM EDT
Jul 12 2012

Quotes of the day- Buckminster Fuller:
 
Richard Buckminster Fuller (July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American philosopher, systems theorist, architect, and inventor, known to many of his friends and fans as "Bucky" Fuller. He created and popularized terms such as "Spaceship Earth", ephemeralization, and synergetics. He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, the most famous of which is the geodesic dome. (Click for full article.)

All of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth, and all the truth, and to do so promptly- right now.

As a consequence of the slavish “categoryitis” the scientifically illogical, and as we shall see, often meaningless questions “Where do you live?” “What are you?” “What religion?” “What race?” “What nationality?” are all thought of today as logical questions. By the twenty-first century it either will have become evident to humanity that these questions are absurd and anti-evolutionary or men will no longer be living on Earth.

Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys- legally enacted game-playing- agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and its all unwitting members.

Dare to be naïve.

Don't fight forces, use them.

Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less.

Everything you've learned in school as obvious becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.

God, to me, it seems is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper.

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.

I find people only listen to you when they ask you to talk to them.

I think it's absolutely touch-and-go whether we're going to make it.

It is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate.

Life is the spirit incarnate in time.

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

People are born with legs, not roots.

Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers.

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

Relativity is inherently convergent, though convergent toward a plurality of centers of abstract truths.

Take the initiative. Go to work, and above all co-operate and don't hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the intellectual integrity governing universe.

The most important thing to teach your children is that the sun does not rise and set. It is the Earth that revolves around the sun. Then teach them the concepts of North, South, East and West, and that they relate to where they happen to be on the planet's surface at that time. Everything else will follow.

The nearest each of us can come to God is by loving the truth.

The opposite of nature is impossible.

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.

The Universe consists of non-simultaneously apprehended events.

Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.

We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.

We must progress to the stage of doing all the right things for all the right reasons instead of doing all the right things for all the wrong reasons.

Also on July 12...

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.

Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close natural observation, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and "Yankee" love of practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs.

Click here for Wikipedia's full article on Thoreau. Click here for a collection of Thoreau quotes from the KGB Quotations Database.


Categories: Buckminster Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Quotes of the day


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Quotes of the day
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Published Sunday, May 06, 2012 @ 2:46 AM EDT
May 06 2012

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862):

A gun gives you the body, not the bird.

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority.

All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.

An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

Any fool can make a rule
And any fool will mind it.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

Do not be too moral.
You may cheat yourself out of much of life.
So aim above morality.
Be not simply good;
be good for something.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office... I have never received more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

How trivial and uninteresting and wearisome and unsatisfactory are all employments for which men will pay you money!

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

I have lived some thirty-odd years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

I say that there are gods but they care not what men do.

I say, beware of enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

If I knew for a certainty that some man was coming to my house with the conscious intention of doing me good, I would run for my life.

If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter- we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad of instances and applications?

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

In the long run, men only hit what they aim at.

It takes two to speak the truth- one to speak, and another to hear.

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

Many go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

Men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest.

That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another's. We see so much only as we possess.

The gods can never leave a man in the world who is privy to their secrets. They cannot have a spy here.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

The rich man... is always sold to the institution which makes him rich.

The wisest man preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky.

The youth gets together the materials for a bridge to the moon, and at length the middle-aged man decides to make a woodshed with them.

Things do not change, we do.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

We live but a fraction of our life. Why do we not let on the flood, raise the gates, and set all our wheels in motion? He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. Employ your senses.

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate oddfellow society.


Categories: Henry David Thoreau, Quotes of the day


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