Tinkering Quotes (6 quotes)
Progress may have been all right once, but it went on too long;
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.
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.
From poem 'Come, Come, Kerouac! My Generation is Beater Than Yours', in magazine New Yorker (4 Apr 1959).
The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.
With co-author John P. Holdren, in Saturday Review (5 June 1971), 54, 59. Ehrlich is making his own paraphrase of an earlier quote, citing Aldo Leopold: “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” See the Aldo Leopold Quotes page of this website. These refer to the importance of supporting an ecosystem by keeping all its parts - saving all the species.
The human mechanism is marvelous. But why not—it is the result of three-and-a-half billion years of tinkering.
Epigraph in Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations (1988), 12.
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.
In Making Hay (2003), 33-34.
Through most of his existence man’s survival depended on his ability to cope with nature. If the mind evolved as an aid in human survival it was primarily as an instrument for the mastery of nature. The mind is still at its best when tinkering with the mathematics that rule nature.
In Before the Sabbath (1979), 26.
To save every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
From 'Conservation' (c.1938), Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold (1953), 146-147. Collected in The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries (1999), 142.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
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