Fifty years ago...........................

Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) makes the cover of Time magazine.  Fuller was an architect, professor, inventor, author, designer, speaker of interesting things, thinker, an environmentalist before it was popular, and a "futurist".  He also had some experience with failure (flunking out of Harvard twice and being fired) and tragedy (death of his three year old daughter).  You can read more about him here, here, or if you are a Time subscriber you can read the January 10, 1964 cover story here.

As noted above, Fuller also said some interesting things.  A number of his quotes have appeared here before.  Feel free to search the site.  Here are a dandy few new ones:

"So long as mathematicians can impose up-and-down semantics upon students while trafficking personally in the non-up-and-down advantages of their concise statements, they can impose upon the ignorance of man a monopoly of access to accurate processing of information and can fool even themselves by thought habits governing the becoming behavior of professional specialists, by disclaiming the necessity of, or responsibility for, comprehensive adjustment of the a priori thought to total reality of universal principles."

"The opposite of nature is impossible"

"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"

and my favorite:

"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist.So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."