Buck Minster Fuller

"In 1927, at age thirty-two, finding myself a "throwaway" in
the business world, I sought to use myself as my scientific
"guinea pig" (my most objectively considered research "subject")
in a lifelong experiment designed to discover what -if anything
-a healthy young male human of average size, experience, and
capability with an economically dependent wife and newborn
child, starting without capital or any kind of wealth, cash
savings, account monies, credit, or university degree, could
effectively do that could not be done by great nations or great
private enterprise to lastingly improve the physical protect-
ion and support of all human lives, at the same time removing
undesirable restraints and improving individual initiatives
of any and all humans aboard our planet Earth."

Critical Path (1981)

"We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of special-
ization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently,
society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be
crisply brief. . . . In the meantime, humanity has been deprived
of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings
of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has
also resulted in the individual's leaving responsibility for
thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds
biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological
discord, which, in turn, leads to war."

Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975)

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.

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

"on first priority in design consideration is the full realization
of individual potential in order to reach the second derivative —
full realization for all individuals"

No More Secondhand God (1963)