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About this quote

What does it mean?
Fuller warns that individual integrity is critical to survival, and failing it could lead to destruction.
In plain terms
If individuals lack integrity, we risk destroying ourselves.
What can you take from it?
Maintain personal integrity to ensure collective survival.

Where it applies

  • leadership
  • ethical decision making
  • community building

Putting it to work

  • audit personal ethics
  • model integrity
  • build trust

Questions to consider

  • What does passing the examination of integrity look like?
  • How does individual integrity affect the whole?

Another view

It oversimplifies global survival as dependent solely on individual character.

More from Buckminster Fuller

  1. I have to say, I think that we are in some kind of final examination as to whether human beings now, with this capability to acquire information and to communi…

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  2. When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I've been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. T…

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  3. I never try to tell anybody else what to do, number one. And number two, I think that's what the individual is all about. Each one of us has something to contr…

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