TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition, we must lead it... That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That�s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index T > Category: Tinkering

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.
From poem 'Come, Come, Kerouac! My Generation is Beater Than Yours', in magazine New Yorker (4 Apr 1959).
Science quotes on:  |  Kitty Hawk (5)  |  Long (778)  |  Progress (492)  |  Right (473)  |  Start (237)  |  Think (1122)  |  Two (936)  |  Orville Wright (10)  |  Wilbur Wright (14)  |  Wrong (246)

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.
Science quotes on:  |  Conservation (187)  |  Ecosystem (33)  |  First (1302)  |  Intelligent (108)  |  Part (235)  |  Rule (307)  |  Save (126)  |  Tinker (6)

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.
Science quotes on:  |  Anatomy (75)  |  Billion (104)  |  Human (1512)  |  Marvelous (31)  |  Mechanism (102)  |  Result (700)  |  Tinker (6)  |  Why (491)  |  Year (963)

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.
Science quotes on:  |  Aesthetic (48)  |  Aestheticism (2)  |  Blade (11)  |  Boot (5)  |  Constitute (99)  |  Cutter (2)  |  Design (203)  |  Different (595)  |  Economy (59)  |  Efficiency (46)  |  End (603)  |  Farm (28)  |  Farmer (35)  |  First (1302)  |  Good (906)  |  Greater (288)  |  Havoc (7)  |  Hum (4)  |  Intractable (3)  |  Invention (400)  |  Inventor (79)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Motive (62)  |  Move (223)  |  Problem (731)  |  Question (649)  |  Reduce (100)  |  Relentless (9)  |  Seed (97)  |  Simple (426)  |  Simplicity (175)  |  Solution (282)  |  Stalk (6)  |  Steel (23)  |  Unexpected (55)  |  Vagrant (5)

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.
Science quotes on:  |  Ability (162)  |  Aid (101)  |  Best (467)  |  Cope (9)  |  Depend (238)  |  Evolution (635)  |  Existence (481)  |  Human (1512)  |  Instrument (158)  |  Man (2252)  |  Mastery (36)  |  Mathematics (1395)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Most (1728)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Primary (82)  |  Rule (307)  |  Still (614)  |  Survival (105)  |  Through (846)  |  Tinker (6)

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.
Science quotes on:  |  Cog (7)  |  Conservation (187)  |  First (1302)  |  Intelligent (108)  |  Precaution (5)  |  Save (126)  |  Tinker (6)  |  Wheel (51)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail 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) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.