Pneumatic Quotes & Sayings

As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars. — James Gleick

In one memorable episode, Warren received a trusting note from a woman in the bookkeeping department via the library's pneumatic-tube system, which ran between the library and store. "It's very slow here on this rainy day," the bookkeeper complained. "Please send me one of those novels you have had to withdraw from circulation as unfit for a lady to read." Warren fulfilled the request and was surprised the next day to receive the book back, discreetly wrapped, with the message: "Blessings upon you! You're quite right. This is not fit for anybody to read. Please send another just like it. — Molly Guptill Manning

I once compiled a list of events that frightened her, and it was quite comprehensive: very loud snoring; low-flying aircraft; church bells; fire engines; trains; buses and lorries; thunder; shouting; large cars; most medium-sized cars; noisy small cars; burglar alarms; fireworks, especially crackers; loud radios; barking dogs; whinnying horses; nearby silent horses; cows in general; megaphones; sheep; corks coming out of sparkling wine bottles; motorcycles, even very small ones; balloons being popped; vacuum cleaners (not being used by her); things being dropped; dinner gongs; parrot houses; whoopee cushions; chiming doorbells; hammering; bombs; hooters; old-fashioned alarm clocks; pneumatic drills; and hairdryers (even those used by her). — John Cleese

Can you imagine any better example of divine creative accomplishment that the consummate flying machine that is a bird? The skeleton, very flexible and strong, is also largely pneumatic - especially in the bigger birds. The beak, skull, feet, and all the other bones of a 25-pound pelican have been found to weigh but 23 ounces. — Guy Murchie

To honour its first creation, no sound was permitted within the home of Muse for a full year, no sound save that of its Art: the slow, crisp, click of polished brass gears, the sensual hiss of pneumatic release, the insidious sibilance and decisive thud of a withdrawing and thrusting piston, and the soft groan of the boy held within the cube as each rod ran him through, over and over and over.
Powered by this action, the music box played.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down...
And another piston rammed home.
A mechanism of intricate complexity exchanging great pain for a little beauty. This, here, then, was Life.
Muse was fulfilled. — Cameron Rogers

A pneumatic toy frog hops onto a lily pad, trembling. Beneath the surface, lies terror. — Thomas Pynchon

Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war? — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Next was a castle divided into many small rooms, with a system for passing messages between rooms through a pneumatic tube. In each room was a group of people who responded to the messages by following certain rules laid out in books, which usually entailed sending more messages to other rooms. After — Neal Stephenson

This kiss is zeroes and ones jumbled
and tossed into a pneumatic system,
unscrambled at the end and scrawled
onto a tape recorder slowly rolling
at the side of your bed,
then slapping back, reverbed
off the ringer, a tinny phantom
of the smooch like a smack on
an aluminum can, up the same
veins through the belly of the same satellite
and softly to the side of my head; — Mike Doughty

With a pneumatic hiss, the door slid open.
Brother John says the hiss is not an inevitable consequence of the operation of the door. It could have been made to open silently.
He incorporated the hiss to remind himself that in every human enterprise, no matter with what virtuous intentions it is undertaken, a serpent lurks. — Dean Koontz

I did some research once on the way people in the past imagined the year 2000. They tended to picture the things they already had getting more sophisticated - flying cars, self-cleaning windows. And the folks in the early 1900s had a wildly optimistic estimate of the future of pneumatic tubes. — Gail Collins

Uncorsetted, her friendly bust
Gives promise of pneumatic bliss. — T. S. Eliot

Her head felt like miniature construction workers had taken up residence. Along with jackhammers and pneumatic drills, they were now whistling at passing women and yelling "Hey, baby!" She made the pledge of hung-over idiots everywhere: I'm never drinking again. — Kate Meader

The jumbo jet is the airborne equivalent of the interstate highway ... One might as well be stuffed into a cartridge and shot through a pneumatic tube, like interoffice mail. — Lance Morrow

In the subway the trains move so swiftly you can never catch your breath. Outside the grimy window that's a reflecting surface like a mirror mostly there are the rushing tunnel walls, that slow as the train slows for a station, and the doors open with a pneumatic hiss like the sigh of a great ugly beast, and passengers lurch off, and new passengers lurch on, and I lift my eyes hopeful and yearning Who will be my destiny? Which one of you? — Joyce Carol Oates

Customer expectations? Nonsense. No customer ever asked for the electric light, the pneumatic tire, the VCR, or the CD. All customer expectations are only what you and your competitor have led him to expect. He knows nothing else. — W. Edwards Deming

True, Clara's eyebrows didn't meet. But she was really too pneumatic. Whereas Fifi and Joanna were absolutely right. Plump, blonde, not too large ... And it was that great lout, Tom Kawaguchi, who now took the seat between them. — Aldous Huxley

Though I loved the wired world, the new-wave librarians, the avatars and activists, I turned into a dinosaur in that library. I couldn't help it; I was an old-fashioned writer who loved the ancient books summoned via pneumatic tubes, the archives, the quiet. I had found something rare there: an inexhaustible wonder. — Marilyn Johnson

Spoiled [10w]
When a woman gets used to an industrial quality pneumatic drill,
I seriously doubt if she'll use a vibrator again. — Beryl Dov

The Air Loom had been constructed by the Jacobins in Paris around the time of their coup d'etat in 1793. Just as they had corrupted the ideals of the Enlightenment to their despotic ends, so had they corrupted Enlightenment science. The secret of its power was pneumatic chemistry, the science of the invisible elements known as 'airs' or 'gases,' which had been developed by some of the great geniuses who had inspired the revolution. — Mike Jay

He proposed a steam-powered pneumatic tube system to carry telegraph forms the short distance from the Stock Exchange to the main telegraph office. — Tom Standage

To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. — George Orwell

Now one day - and we know the day, August 1, 1774 - Priestley put calx of mercury underneath a glass. He focused the sun's hot rays on the calx with his new 12" diameter magnifying glass. It began to give off a gas. The calx of mercury changed back into mercury, and Priestley trapped the gas with his pneumatic trough. And then he sat and looked, and thought, and looked some more. He happened to have a lighted candle nearby. Without really thinking about it Priestley exposed the candle to the gas. The flame suddenly flared into brilliance! What was this wondrous gas? If — Benjamin Wiker