Cultural Critics

"He saw a cottage with a double coach-house, A cottage of gentility; And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin Is pride that apes humility."

"He saw a Lawyer killing a viper On a dunghill hard by his own stable; And the Devil smiled, for it put him in mind Of Cain and his brother, Abel."

"His jacket was red and his breeches were blue, And there was a hole where the tail came through."

"And backward and forward he switched his long tail As a gentleman switches his cane."

"From his brimstone bed at break of day, A walking the Devil is gone, To look at his snug little farm the earth, And see how his stock goes on."

"Lingering he raised his latch at eve, Though tired in heart and limb: He loved no other place, and yet Home was no home to him."

"‘Alas!’ said she, ‘we ne’er can be Made happy by compulsion.’"

"Forth from his dark and lonely hiding place (Portentous-sight!) the owlet Atheism, Sailing an obscene wings athwart the noon, Drops his blue-fringèd lids, and holds them close, And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, Cries out, "Where is it?""

"Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreasts sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple-tree, while all the thatch Smokes in the sun-thaw: whether the eave-drops fall Heard only in the trances of the blast, Or whether the eave-drops fall Heard only in the trances of the blast, Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet moon."

"Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing."

"Sea, and hill, and wood, With all the numberless goings-on of life, Inaudible as dreams!"

"The frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelped by any wind."

"Yes, while I stood and gazed, my temples bare, And shot my being through earth, sea, and air, Possessing all things with intensest love, O Liberty! my spirit felt thee there."

"Thou rising Sun! thou blue rejoicing Sky! Yea! every thing that is and will be free! Bear witness for me, whereso'er ye be, With what deep worship I have still adored The spirit of divinest Liberty."

""Most musical, most melancholy" bird! A melancholy bird! Oh! idle thought! In nature there is nothing melancholy. But some night-wandering man, whose heart was pierced With the remembrance of a grievous wrong, Or slow distemper, or neglected love, (And so, poor wretch! filled all things with himself, And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale Of his own sorrow) he, and such as he, First named these notes a melancholy strain."

"So for the mother’s sake the child was dear, And dearer was the mother for the child."

"And this reft house is that the which he built, Lamented Jack!"

"O! I do love thee, meek Simplicity!"

"And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversly fram'd, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of All?"

"O! the one Life, within us and abroad, Which meets all Motion, and becomes its soul, A Light in Sound, a sound-like power in Light, Rhythm in all Thought, and Joyance every where."

"Blest hour! it was a luxury — to be!"

"Poor little foal of an oppressèd race! I love the languid patience of thy face."

"Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade, Death came with friendly care; The opening bud to heaven conveyed, And bade it blossom there."

"The young world is giving up any interest in their political system. They have decided that it is absolutely corrupt."

"The politicians still say that it's you or me, and that's why they go for the gun."

"Up to now, the world of politics doesn't know that. That's why all nations are dependent on armaments, why we have the arms race."

"But we can do so much now, with so little, that we can take care of everybody. That's why the idea of scarcity is all wrong."

"That's the basis of all politics: it has to be you or me, there's not enough for both of us. Survival of the fittest."

"Politics is policy. What policy should you follow in view of the idea that there isn't enough to go around — the power of the few, or the needs of the many? Political economy is based on misassumptions..."

"It seemed that the time would come evolutionarily when humans might have acquired enough knowledge of generalized principles to permit a graduation from class-two (entropically selfish) evolution into class-one (syntropically cooperative) evolution, thereafter making all the right moves for all the right reasons."

"You have to decide whether you want to make money or make sense, because the two are mutually exclusive."

"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 effective decisions can only be made by the independently thinking and adequately informed human individuals and their telepathically intercommunicated wisdom--the wisdom of the majority of all such human individuals -- qualifying for continuance in Universe as local cosmic problem-solvers -- in love with the truth and in individually spontaneous self-commitment to absolute faith in the wisdom, integrity, and love of God, who seems to wish Earthian humans to survive."

"Love is metaphysical gravity."

"The synergetic integral of the totality of principles is God, whose sum-total behavior in pure principle is beyond our comprehension and is utterly mysterious to us, because as humans — in pure principle — we do not and never will know all the principles."

"There are no solids. There are no things. There are only interfering and noninterfering patterns operative in pure principle, and principles are eternal. Principles never contradict principles. . . ."

"Humans have always unknowingly affected all Universe by every act and thought they articulate or even consider. . . . Realistic, comprehensively responsible, omni-system-considerate, unselfish thinking on the part of humans does absolutely affect human destiny."

"On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate. You can deceive others, you can deceive your brain-self, but you can't deceive your mind-self — for mind deals only in the discovery of truth and the interrelationship of all truths. The cosmic laws with which mind deals are noncorruptible. Cosmic evolution is omniscient God comprehensively articulate."

"It is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination."

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

"Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment. . . . Humanity is in 'final exam' as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe"

"I am convinced that human continuance depends entirely upon: the intuitive wisdom of each and every individual . . . the individual's integrity of speaking and acting only on the individual's own within-self-intuited and reasoned initiative . . . the individual's never joining action with others as motivated only by crowd-engendered-emotionalism, or a sense of the crowd's power to overwhelm, or in fear of holding to the course indicated by one's own intellectual convictions."

"I have learned never to reject one of Fuller's outrageous statements without careful consideration, and even hesitated to call "Sum of angels around each vertex" in the rough manuscript a misprint. The truth has usually turned out far stranger than Buckminster Fuller!"

"Like his great aunt Margaret, Fuller is a transcendentalist: he discerns patterns and accepts their significance on faith. His is not the burden of proof: the pattern is assumed significant unless proven otherwise. If Fuller had been burdened by the necessity of proof, he would have been too hamstrung to continue looking for significant patterns. His own biographical notes in Synergetics show us a mind that accepts information in a highly unorthodox fashion and refuses to swallow the predigested. In rejecting the predigested, Fuller has had to discover the world all by himself. It is not surprising, in fact rather reassuring, that the obvious should emerge alongside the novel, the obscure together with the useful. Posterity will have to draw the line between the mystical and the scientific, a line that will certainly have to be redrawn from time to time."

"The earth, to Fuller, is a "contracting phase" of the universe, a low-pressure zone in the cosmos where energy is collected and stored. The sun's radiation warms the oceans, and the oceans feed the earth. Fuller calls processes which conserve energy aspects of "synergy", a word he relies on heavily in his discussions of the "more-with-less" technologies that will accomplish the defeat of scarcity. An example of synergetic action that Fuller is particularly fond of is the way chrome-nickel steel acquires, through chemical mating, a tensile strength greater than the sum of its components. But the highest expression of synergy is man's intuition, his ability to see comprehensive patterns in random events, which has led him from near helplessness to the point where he can now take control of his own evolution."

"This book is his bible... the distilled wisdom of a lifetime spent contemplating the universe from angles and directions never before suspected."

"Less is more."

"Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete."

"Every child has an enormous drive to demonstrate competence. If humans are not required to earn a living to be provided survival needs, many are going to want very much to be productive, but not at those tasks they did not choose to do but were forced to accept in order to earn money. Instead, humans will spontaneously take upon themselves those tasks that world society really needs to have done."

"In spite of all humans' innate interest in the interrelatedness of all experience, long ago these world-power-structure builders learned to shunt all the bright intellectuals and the physically creative into specialist careers. The powerful reserved for themselves the far easier, because innate, comprehensive functioning. All one needs to do is to discover how self-perpetuating is this disease of specialization is to witness the inter-departmental battling for educational funds and the concomitant jealous guarding of the various specializations assigned to a department's salaried experts on each subject in any university."