Quotes & Sayings About Tinkering

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. — Ronald Reagan

Nutritionists don't stop there, because they can't: they have to manufacture complication, to justify the existence of their profession. These new nutritionists have a major commercial problem with the evidence. There's nothing very professional or proprietary about 'Eat your greens,' so they have had to push things further. But unfortunately for them, the technical, confusing, overcomplicated, tinkering interventions that they promote - the enzymes, the exotic berries - are very frequently not supported by convincing evidence. — Ben Goldacre

The Tinkering School. More of a lab than a school, this summer program, created by computer scientist Gever Tulley, lets children from seven to seventeen play around with interesting stuff and build cool things. — Daniel H. Pink

If you choose to spend an hour every day tinkering with your Facebook profile, or if you don't see any difference between reading Jane Austen on a Kindle and reading her on a printed page, or if you think Grand Theft Auto IV is the greatest Gesamtkunstwerk since Wagner, I'm very happy for you, as long as you keep it to yourself. — Jonathan Franzen

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

Broken Windows theory and the Power of Context are one and the same. They are both based on the premise that an epidemic can be reversed, can be tipped, by tinkering with the smallest details of the immediate environment. This — Malcolm Gladwell

Perhaps I have something of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to modern feminine education. Often youngsters are sadly miscast. I have known girls who should be tinkering with mechanical things instead of making dresses, and boys who would do better at cooking than engineering. — Amelia Earhart

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. — Bill Vaughan

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. — James Cameron

Scientists who study human motivation have lately learned that after basic survival needs have been met, the combination of autonomy (the desire to direct your own life), mastery (the desire to learn, explore, and be creative), and purpose (the desire to matter, to contribute to the world) are our most powerful intrinsic drivers - the three things that motivate us most. All three are deeply woven through the fabric of flow. Thus toying with flow involves tinkering with primal biology: addictive neurochemistry, potent psychology, and hardwired evolutionary behaviors. — Steven Kotler

Even political systems follow a form of rational tinkering, when people are rational hence take the better option: the Romans got their political system by tinkering, not by "reason." Polybius in his Histories compares the Greek legislator Lycurgus, who constructed his political system while "untaught by adversity," to the more experiential Romans, who, a few centuries later, "have not reached it by any process of reasoning [emphasis mine], but by the discipline of many struggles and troubles, and always choosing the best by the light of the experience gained in disaster. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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. — E. M. Forster

Mindset impacts emotion, which alters biology, which increases performance. Thus, it seemed, by tinkering with mindset - using everything from physical to psychological to pharmacological interventions - one could significantly enhance performance. — Steven Kotler

What eventually set him apart was his mindset and drive. He never stopped being the curious, tinkering boy looking for new challenges. — Carol S. Dweck

[I]t kind of terrified me to imagine myself spending the rest of my life tinkering on the margins of the small arguments. — Lawrence Lessig

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

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. — Eric Hoffer

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

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. — Chad VanGaalen

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. — Quincy Jones

Describing good relatedness to someone, no matter how precisely or how often, does not inscribe it into the neural networks that inspire love. Self-help books are like car repair manuals: you can read them all day, but doing so doesn't fix a thing. Working on a car means rolling up your sleeves and getting under the hood, and you have to be willing to get dirt on your hands and grease beneath your fingernails. Overhauling emotional knowledge is no spectator sport; it demands the messy experience of yanking and tinkering that comes from a limbic bond. If someone's relationship today bear a troubled imprint, they do so because an influential relationship left its mark on a child's mind. When a limbic connection has established a neural pattern, it takes a limbic connection to revise it. (177) — Thomas Lewis

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. — Josh Duhamel

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. — Beth Simone Noveck

Let us beware of tinkering with our inner life in hope ourselves to rend the veil. God must do everything for us. Our part is to yield and trust. We must confess, forsake, repudiate the self-life, and then reckon it crucified. But we must be careful to distinguish lazy "acceptance" from the real work of God. We must insist upon the work being done. We dare not rest content with a neat doctrine of self-crucifixion. That is to imitate Saul and spare the best of the sheep and the oxen. — A.W. Tozer

Vimes, listening with his mouth open, wondered why the hell it was that dwarfs believed that they had no religion and no priests. Being a dwarf was a religion. People went into the dark for the good of the clan, and heard things, and were changed, and came back to tell ...
And then, fifty years ago, a dwarf tinkering in Ankh-Morpork had found that if you put a simple fine mesh over your lantern flame it'd burn blue in the presence of the gas but wouldn't explode. It was a discovery of immense value to the good of dwarfkind and, as so often happens with such discoveries, almost immediately led to a war.
"And afterwards there were two kinds of dwarf," said Cheery sadly. "There's the Copperheads, who all use the lamp and the patent gas exploder, and the Schmaltzbergers, who stick to the old ways. Of course we're all dwarfs," she said, "but relations are strained. — Terry Pratchett

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. — Verlyn Klinkenborg

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. — James MacGregor Burns

There was some sort of commotion going on outside, and I decided I'd had enough. I went to the door and stuck my head out. Marco was gasping for breath on the sofa, and two of the guards were bent over a cell phone.
"What are you doing?" I demanded.
"Trying to record this," the smart-ass from the shopping trip told me. "Nobody is going to believe us otherwise."
"Well, cut it out. It isn't funny!"
"On what planet?"
I glared at him, which did no good,because he simply went back to to tinkering with the phone. So I looked at Marco. "Can't you do anything with them?"
Marco flopped a hand at me, tears streaming down his reddened cheeks, and tried to say something. But all that came out for several moments were asthmatic wheezes. I bent over his prone form, starting to worry about him, and he put a hand on my neck and pulled me down.
" It ... is ... funny," he gasped. — Karen Chance

I loved when my dad was home. He liked to sit in the living room and watch boxing and baseball on TV. Or he'd be tinkering around or listening to records by his musician buddies - George Shearing, Oscar Peterson and the Jackie Gleason Orchestra. — Natalie Cole

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. — Caroline Knapp

Your faith in Homo technologicus -the Tinkering Man- has one fatal flaw. It offers you no escape clause. — David Brin

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

I suppose people who graduate from very selective and expensive colleges, and receive immense reinforcement from colleagues who preceded them there, develop an inflated sense of their ability to effectively manage things, especially complex things. Many of these young, bright people cannot believe that our creaking and foundering systems won't yield to their managerial tinkering, and the net effect must be to turn them into very cynical careerists with nothing left but personal ladder-climbing and wealth accumulation ... The political left in America makes up in cynical cowardly avarice for all the mendacious stupidity on the political right, so we end up at this moment in history with a perfect blend of every bad impulse in human nature and none of the virtues. — James Howard Kunstler

People build something that works. Then circumstances change, and they have to tinker with it to make it continue to work, and they are so busy tinkering that they cannot see that a much better idea would be to build a whole new system to deal with the new circumstances. But to an outsider, the idea is obvious. — Terry Pratchett

Evolution, or its driving engine natural selection, has no foresight. In every generation within every species, the individuals best equipped to survive and reproduce contribute more than their fair share of genes to the next generation. The consequence, blind as it is, is the nearest approach to foresight that nature permits. [...] It is always tinkering: here shrinking a bit, there expanding a bit, constantly adjusting, putting on and taking off, optimising immediate reproductive success. Survival in future centuries doesn't enter into the calculation, for the good reason that it isn't really a calculation at all. It all happens automatically, as some genes survive in the gene pool and others don't. — Richard Dawkins

By sending the contradictory message that the famous are just plain folks on Mount Olympus, America has forged a relentless tension between loftiness and accessibility. Stir in the fact that the inborn talent and intelligence needed to achieve fame are immune to distributive tinkering by government programs and you have a definition of fame certain to produce envious rage: somebody screwed democracy. — Florence King

Despite all of our incessant tinkering, we can't manufacture the things we most desperately need. And if perchance we do, they will never be more than pathetically emaciated facsimiles that will leave us emaciated. And until we finally realize that we can only 'find' these things, we will never sense any compulsion to 'find' God. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

The thing itself, the first thing, will never do us alone, we must be elaborating, improving, poeticising. — Sebastian Barry

I just kept moodling. I came up with hundreds of ideas. Most of them were too small, but I kept at it and after a while I moodled up a few big ones. With some tinkering, I turned those big ideas into real possibilities and from there I created my masterpiece..." -Dill — Paige Britt

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. — Aldo Leopold

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

I have been in the bodies of people who I suspect would give almost anything to have this body, to be this person. I'd be more hesitant, if I had a choice. Because over the years I have become wary of tinkering with nature in this way. A body like this is rarely natural. A body like this must be created and maintained. And when you give so much energy to the body, there ends up being very little energy for much else, at least when you are sixteen and just starting to form it. Perhaps if I could feel the satisfaction and admiration as my own, I would feel differently. — David Levithan

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

Must we go tinkering about with Nature before we can enjoy it? — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

It was, he thought, his gesture against the whole pro-euthanasia movement that talked so glibly of choice without realising the fire with which one played when tinkering with fragile taboos against killing others. Yes, he thought, Mrs Bates's life did not seem to amount to much, but to her it was all she had. — Alexander McCall Smith

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. — Herman Melville

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. — Melissa McCarthy

People want only special revolutions, in externals, in politics, and so on. But that's just tinkering. What is really is called for is a revolution of the human mind. — Henrik Ibsen

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. — Ogden Nash

Hire the best people you can find. This was kind of easy in the early days of foursquare - we hired our friends who were really passionate about the stuff they were building. We have a superstar team not just because their resumes are so strong, but because they've been passionate, thinking about and tinkering in this space forever. Those are the people you want to surround yourself with. — Dennis Crowley

Our urge to undo things must come from an idea that what we find in the natural world isn't good enough, that our tinkering will make it better. Spare us the scandal of improvement, I say. — Gretel Ehrlich

This is what we do. We fix things. We're tinker-ers. If we didn't tinker with cars, we'd tinker with people."

Drew flashed a rare grin. "You already tinker with people, Cletus."

"You are correct," I sat straighter in my seat, ready to defend myself, "but only my family. And y'all deserve my tinkering."

"Don't get me wrong. You're good at tinkering. Aside from those revenge plots, people are lucky to have you interfering in their lives. — Penny Reid

We all must determine what types of anatomical castanets vest in our central core. For aught we know, we still tend to think of ourselves as a complete and fixed product. In reality, analogous to an unfinished paper, working from the inside out, we are retooling ourselves every day whether we recognize the minor or major tinkering taking place or not. In a neurological sense, the brain is constantly working to build and rebuild itself. In a psychological sense, every day the human mind is altering who we are. We constantly take in new information that modifies and enhances our understanding of the world and our place in the environment. Every day we are using the sense of self and our accumulated knowledge to adapt to our world and modify our thinking and behavior. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Technology is the result of antifragility, exploited by risk-takers in the form of tinkering and trial and error, with nerd-driven design confined to the backstage. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

For twenty years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and for most of my literary life the difference between throwing something in the trash and publishing it was imperceptible... — Rebecca Solnit

Personally, I treasure my ignorance of how machinery works, although I am well aware that this is something of great interest to some people, he added, in a tone of voice that suggested he meant strange and secret people ... busy people, excitable people, fiddling people, tinkering and volatile people. A kind, alas, who would say something as innocent as, let's give it a try, it can't hurt, surely? We can always hide under the coffee table. — Terry Pratchett

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. — Ally Carter

The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts. — Paul R. Ehrlich

From the dawn of time, whenever humanity has wanted to know more, we have achieved it most effectively not by removing ourselves from the world to ponder and theorize, but rather by getting our hands dirty and making careful observations of real stuff. In short, we have learned primarily by tinkering. — Curt Gabrielson

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. — Debra Dean

The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So 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. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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. — Frank Chodorov

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. — Duke Ellington

So when she wasn't sleeping or just sitting and listening to the storm or tinkering at her workbench, she flew. — Greg Rucka

'Humans of New York' did not result from a flash on inspiration. It grew from five years of experimenting, tinkering, and messing up. — Brandon Stanton

What was once considered impossible is now quite easily achieved. Kings and lords come and go and leave nothing but statues in a desert, while a couple of young men tinkering in a workshop change the way the world works. — Terry Pratchett

fun isn't the experience of pleasure, but the outcome of tinkering with a small part of the world in a surprising way. Think — Ian Bogost

The process of discovery (or innovation, or technological progress) itself depends on antifragile tinkering, aggressive risk bearing rather than formal education. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Virginia 's tax system needs to be fixed. The time to act is now. Do not send me any more studies. Do not send me another piecemeal approach that confuses tinkering with real reform. — Mark Warner

If you build a Model T and you can see the Camry, you don't spend time tinkering with the T; you go straight to the next thing. Once you build the Camry, you can see the Ferrari, so you go straight to that. — Graham Hawkes

The man who has struggled to purify himself and has had nothing but repeated failures will experience real relief when he stops tinkering with his soul and looks away to the perfect One. While he looks at Christ the very things he has so long been trying to do will be getting done within him. It will be God working in him to will and to do. — A.W. Tozer

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. — Chris Carmack

Yeah, some of my college friends and I have been tinkering around for years, you know, just for fun. — Eric Roberts

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. — William Graham Sumner

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. — Russell Kirk

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. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

I spent my childhood tinkering with electronic circuits, on breadboards, as they used to be called, in particular making radio transmitters. — Giles Foden

I wasn't much into girlfriends. I was too busy tinkering in the garage. — Woody Norris

There are, in human affairs, two kinds of problems: those which are amenable to a technical solution and those which are not. Universal health-care coverage belongs to the first category: you can pick one of several possible solutions, pass a bill, and (allowing for some tinkering around the edges) it will happen. — Atul Gawande

The children are intrigued by these invitation, and it's only a matter of minutes before they find themselves engaged in a new world of possibilities. — Rachelle Doorley

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. — Leroy Chiao

I like tinkering with the tribe beat boxes and love using Reason as a beefed up beat box. — Pat Mastelotto

Like the eye which sees everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is occupied with the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all. While we are looking at God, we do not see ourselves - blessed riddance. The man who has struggled to purify himself and has had nothing but repeated failures will experience real relief when he stops tinkering with his soul and looks away to the perfect One. — A.W. Tozer

A creative invitation is a combination of materials and context that intrigue children with a suggestion of play. — Rachelle Doorley

I was always into science fiction as a kid. I loved science and tinkering with things. — David Hanson

I'm a contract computer scientist by trade, but I'm the founder of something called the Tinkering School. It's a summer program which aims to help kids to learn how to build the things that they think of. — Gever Tulley

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

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. — John F. Kerry

A crowd whose discontent has risen no higher than the level of slogans is only a crowd. But a crowd that understands the reasons for its discontent and knows the remedies is a vital community, and it will have to be reckoned with. I would rather go before the government with two people who have a competent understanding of an issue, and who therefore deserve a hearing, than with two thousand who are vaguely dissatisfied.
But even the most articulate public protest is not enough. We don't live in the government or in institutions or in our public utterances and acts, and the environmental crisis has its roots in our lives. By the same token, environmental health will also be rooted in our lives. That is, I take it, simply a fact, and in the light of it we can see how superficial and foolish we would be to think that we could correct what is wrong merely by tinkering with the institutional machinery. The changes that are required are fundamental changes in the way we are living. — Wendell Berry

Black holes are the last vestige of civilizations obsessed with tinkering. — Kane Freeman

We all want to believe that the key to making an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality of the ideas we present. But in none of these cases did anyone substantially alter the content of what they were saying. Instead, they tipped the message by tinkering, on the margin, with the presentation of their ideas, ... — Malcolm Gladwell

When you engage with people, you build your own insight into what's being discussed. Someone else's understanding complements yours, and together you start to weave an informed interpretation. You tinker until you can move on. — Marcia Conner

I think my dad did legal work for someone who had a Packard Bell 8088, and they couldn't pay him, so they gave him a computer. I was initially not allowed to touch it, but that didn't last long. I started tinkering with it, and there were many times I screwed up the computer. — Jeremy Stoppelman

We wouldn't have to speak so critically if businesses would stop feeding dead animals to live ones, putting non-food substances into food, tinkering with genetic codes, and spraying the countryside with poisons. — Donella Meadows

Innovation within services like CompuServe took place at the center of the network rather than at its fringes. PCs were to be only the delivery vehicles for data sent to customers, and users were not themselves expected to program or to be able to receive services from anyone other than their central service provider. CompuServe depended on the phone network's physical layer generativity to get the last mile to a subscriber's house, but CompuServe as a service was not open to third-party tinkering. — Jonathan L. Zittrain

Works of art are not so much finished as abandoned. Perhaps poems can be perfect. A short-short story might even be perfectible, as effective and enjoyable for one reader as the next. But novels and other book-length narratives are great rambling things that always contain some flaws. For works of any length, there comes a point when your continued tinkering won't improve the whole, but will just trade one set of problems for another. — Bruce Holland Rogers

Tinkering is a way of understanding difficult problems, of wrapping our heads around them and quantifying the unknowns. — Gever Tulley

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. — Brian Donohoe

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. — Paolo Bacigalupi

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