Daily Inspiration Quote by R. Buckminster Fuller

Fuller’s line lands like a sly diagnosis of modern life: genius isn’t rare, it’s routine - until the world gets its hands on you. Coming from an inventor who treated design as moral philosophy, the provocation isn’t just feel-good egalitarianism. It’s an indictment of the systems that sand down original perception into acceptable behavior.

“Born a genius” reframes genius as a baseline condition: the infant brain is a pattern-hungry engine, shamelessly experimental, unafraid to be wrong. The verb “de-geniuses” is the real knife. Fuller turns “genius” from a mystical noun into something that can be bureaucratically removed, like a passport at the border. It suggests a slow, cumulative stripping: schooling that rewards compliance over curiosity, workplaces that prize predictability, social norms that punish the weird but necessary questions. The hyphenated coinage also carries a designer’s sensibility - language as prototype - implying this diminishment is engineered, not accidental.

Context matters: Fuller spent decades pitching radically efficient solutions (geodesic domes, “Spaceship Earth” thinking) to a culture addicted to incrementalism and status quo economics. His subtext is partly self-portrait: the inventor as someone who kept a childlike systems vision while institutions tried to “adult” it out of him. There’s also a quiet political edge: if genius is widely distributed, then wasted human potential isn’t a personal failing; it’s a collective design flaw. The line works because it flatters the reader while blaming the machine - and then dares you to redesign it.