Richard Henry Dana Quotes

As you get older, things conk out. It's a bit like a car. As long as it's something the mechanics can fix, you can chug on for a few more thousand miles.

An accident, a random change, in any delicate mechanism can hardly be expected to improve it. Poking a stick into the machinery of one's watch or one's radio set will seldom make it work better.

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.

If you improve or tinker with something long enough, eventually it will break or malfunction.

People are beautiful wrecks.

Objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.

Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational.

You don't have to know how to build an automobile or a television set or a laptop to know how to use it.

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.

The good thing about people really is their iffy-ness and dodginess, isn't it?

Nothing in Chicago seems to be working the way it’s supposed to.

Complex systems work until the day that they don’t work.

The fact that everything ever works perfectly together, anybody who tells you that is pulling your leg.

Technology does not always rhyme with perfection and reliability. Far from it in reality!

An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs.

It has been my observation and experience, and that of my family, that nothing human works out well.

A woman that is like a German clock, Still a-repairing, ever out of frame, And never going aright, being a watch, But being watched that it may still go right!

To me, love is a pure idea forged in flesh, awkwardly maybe, but it had to connect to somewhere, despite twists and turns of underground cable. An all-too-perfect thing. Sometimes the lines get crossed. Or you get a wrong number. But that's nobody's fault. It'll always be like that, so long as we exist in this physical form. As a matter of principle.

The nicest constitutions of government are often like the finest pieces of clock-work, which, depending on so many motions, are therefore more subject to be out of order.

Technology is everything that doesn’t work yet.

Sometimes when you mend a chain, the place where you fix it is strongest of all... Never was a chain that couldn't be broken. Sometimes its even a good idea.

I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.

Technology is the name we give to stuff that doesn't work properly yet

Scientists have been struck by the fact that things that break down virtually never get lost, while things that get lost hardly ever break down.

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.