Buckminster Fuller quotes:
"It is not for me to change you. The question is, how can I be of service
to you without diminishing your degrees of freedom?"
"We have reached the point where we are now possessed of sufficient
information for each individual human to dare to exercise the option
to ``make it'' rather than having to depend on the decisions of an
educated elite."
"We are most probably here for local information-gathering and
local-Universe problem-solving in support of the integrity of eternally
regenerative Universe."
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change
something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
"Don't fight forces, use them"
"There is no energy crisis, food crisis or environmental crisis.
There is only a crisis of ignorance."
"I learned very early and painfully that you have to decide at the outset
whether you are trying to make money or to make sense, as they are mutually
exclusive."
"I'm not trying to imitate nature, I'm trying to find the principles she's using."
"Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly
one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the
theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that
specialization precludes comprehensive thinking."
"There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you its going to be a butterfly."
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Edward Abbey quotes:
“If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.”
“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
“If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.”
“Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.”
“Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.”
“My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.”
“We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men.”
“One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.”
“We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.”
“What most people really desire is something quite different from industrial gimmickry- liberty, spontaneity, nakedness, mystery, wildness, wilderness.”
