Tinkering Quotes

I love writing stand-up so much and tinkering and looking for ideas.

There are lots of people out there who prefer tinkering to winning - it gives them a good excuse.

Tinkering is something we need to know how to do in order to keep something like the space station running. I am a tinkerer by nature.

But we have inherited a vast number of social ills which never came from Nature. They are the complicated products of all the tinkering, muddling, and blundering of social doctors in the past.

I'm always tinkering with something - suddenly I'll think I can work with wood, but then I'll realize I can't, so I go back to sewing.

Writing is very improvisational. It's like trying to fix a broken sewing machine with safety pins and rubber bands. A lot of tinkering.

The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts

Have Liverpool done too much tinkering and tailoring with the system?

Never let an inventor run a company. You can never get him to stop tinkering and bring something to market

Mastery in poetry consists largely in the instinct for not ruining or smothering or tinkering with moments of vision.

I think progress began to retrogress when Wilbur and Orville started tinkering around in Dayton and at Kitty Hawk, because I believe that two Wrights made a wrong.

Let us face reality. The framers (of the Constitution) have simply been too shrewd for us. They have outwitted us. They designed separate institutions that cannot be unified by mechanical linkages frail bridges(or) tinkering. If we are to turn the founders upside down we must directly confront the Constitutional structure they erected.

Love life seems to be that factor which requires the largest quantity of magical tinkering.

Fed and electoral college could use some tinkering, but they are not the source of the problems.

Politics has always been the art of the possible. Today it's too often the art of the probable - tinkering around the edges without any greater vision, without a sense of optimism and imagination.

It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion.

Perhaps our originality manifests itself most strikingly in what we do with that which we did not originate. To discover something wholly new can be a matter of chance, of idle tinkering, or even of the chronic dissatisfaction of the untalented.

We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it.

True conformity to the dictates of nature requires reverence for the past and solicitude for the future. 'Nature' is not simply the sensation of the passing moment; it is eternal, though we evanescent men experience only a fragment of it. We have no right to imperil the happiness of posterity by impudently tinkering with the heritage of humanity.

Starting early and getting girls on computers, tinkering and playing with technology, games and new tools, is extremely important for bridging the gender divide that exists now in computer science and in technology.

Congress is going to start tinkering with the Ten Commandments just as soon as they find someone in Washington who has read them.

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.

To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

I think the federal Liberals' micro-tinkering is not causing any kind of upsurge in public confidence. The challenge for Conservatives is how to not get caught in the same web. I mean, the public just discounts what political people and parties say.

By all odds, earliest man, so naked to the elements and to deadly enemies, should have existed in a state of constant shock. We find him instead the only lighthearted being in a deadly serious universe.... He alone, with childish carelessness, tinkered and played, and exerted himself more in the pursuit of superfluities than of necessities. Yet the tinkering and playing, and the fascination with the nonessential, were a chief source of the inventiveness which enabled man to prevail over better-equipped and more-purposeful animals.

(In cooking), there is always room for careful tinkering.

Every time my cameras go out on a movie, we learn something new and then we take what we learn and we put it into the next generation of the cameras so we're constantly improving. It's kind of like building a race car, racing it, then running back to the shop and working on the engine some more and tinkering with it to improve it.

Before you open the lunch menu or order that cheeseburger or consider eating the cake with the frosting intact, haul out the psychic calculator and start tinkering with the budget.

I began by tinkering around with some old tunes I knew. Then, just to try something different, I set to putting some music to the rhythm that I used in jerking ice-cream sodas at the Poodle Dog. I fooled around with the tune more and more until at last, lo and behold, I had completed my first piece of finished music.

Basement?' Hamish cried, then glanced at his brother. 'You hear this fellow? He thinks we can just go on down to the furnace and start tinkering?' Angus laughed. 'He probably wouldn't care at all if the whole place went boom, he wouldn't.' At this the guard bristled and stood up even straighter. 'Now see here---' 'No, you see, my good man. Out here, see, we've got snow. So in there, I'd bet, you've got heat. And where there's heat there's gas; and where there's gas there's...' Angus trailed off while his brother said, 'boom.

I'm sort of an old man, always tinkering in the backyard. Since I grew up playing outdoors, I still like to plant things, sit out on the deck, or go hiking.

I like taking things apart and putting them back together. Tinkering. I'd be a professional tinkerer. Tinkerbell. I think that's what they're called.

Had I to give advice to writers (and I do not think they need it, because everyone has to find out things for himself), I would tell them simply this; I would ask them to tamper as little as they can with their own work. I do not think tinkering does any good. The moment comes when one has found out what one can do - when one has found one's natural voice, one's rhythm. Then I do not think that slight emendations should prove useful.

I was always tinkering around with stuff but nothing serious at the time. I was doing animations and drawing like crazy, but I wasn't imagining that I'd be performing music for people, that's for sure.

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?

We cannot restore traditional American freedom unless we limit the government's power to tax.

We cannot restore traditional American freedom unless we limit the government's power to tax. No tinkering with this, that, or the other law will stop the trend toward socialism. We must repeal the Sixteenth Amendment.

Keep my eyes fixed on You, Lord. Help me to stop tinkering and realize my total inability to change. I look to You to change me and give me victory as I focus on Your friendly eyes looking lovingly at me. Amen.

I think I was also afraid of the novel. I write line by line, proceeding at snail's pace, rewriting as I go and paring the excess away. This is against all the best advice for writing long form prose, and I have tried over the years to break myself of the habit, but I can't bear to leave anything ungainly on the page and half the fun for me is that tinkering. So the length of a novel was a daunting prospect.

Devolving APD to Scotland is merely tinkering with it. We have to get shot of this hated tax right across the country to ensure all of our airports are competing on level terms.

A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was a tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect, he becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all‐knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified.

From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.

I got in the school band and the school choir. It all hit me like a ton of bricks, everything just came out. I played percussion for a while, and stayed after school forever just tinkering around with different things, the clarinets and the violins.

The Unexpected stalks a farm in big boots like a vagrant bent on havoc. Not every farmer is an inventor, but the good ones have the seeds of invention within them. Economy and efficiency move their relentless tinkering and yet the real motive often seems to be aesthetic. The mind that first designed a cutter bar is not far different from a mind that can take the intractable steel of an outsized sickle blade and make it hum in the end. The question is how to reduce the simplicity that constitutes a problem ("It's simple; it's broke.") to the greater simplicity that constitutes a solution.

Every living thing is an elaboration of a single original plan. As humans we are mere increments - each of us a musty archive of adjustments, adaptations, modifications and providential tinkerings stretching back to 3,8 billion years. Remarkably we are even quite closely related to fruit and vegetables. About half the chemical functions that take place in a banana are fundamentally the same as the chemical functions that place in you. It cannot be said too often: all life is one. That is, and I suspect will ever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is.

I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill.

There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty - in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub - our immediate duty is to stop it.

Because democratic institutions do not renew themselves as effortlessly as flowering trees, they demand the ceaseless tinkering of people who possess both the courage and the honesty to admit their mistakes and accept responsibility for even the most inglorious acts.

Our problems are both acute and chronic, yet all we hear from those in positions of leadership are the same tired proposals for more government tinkering, more meddling and more control---all of which led us to this state in the first place... We must have the clarity of vision to see the difference between what is essential and what is merely desirable, and then the courage to bring our government back under control and make it acceptable to the people.