Simple Tools Quotes

The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested, and it's very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes.

I managed to work for more than 50 years with just paper, pencils and film. My son's generation and the one coming up after can't work with just paper and pencils any more. I managed to avoid using a computer. I don't even have a cellphone. I feel lucky I managed to live like that.

But with writing, all you need is a pad of paper.

The most rewarding thing for me has been this affirmation for me that people are basically good and smart, and if you give them a simple tool that allows them to exhibit that behavior, they'll prove it to you every single day.

I like stuff designed by dead people. The old designers. They always got it right because they didn't have to grow up with computers. All of the people that made the spoon and the dishes and the vacuum cleaner didn't have microprocessors and stuff. You could do a good design back then.

When I started off, I was working in a shed behind my house. All I had was a drill, an electric drill. That was the only machine I had.

I'm not a real gadgety person. But bottle opener is probably the gadget I can't live without. Actually, I can open a bottle of beer pretty easily without it, but wine is always too much of a pain in the (rear) to open that up. So a corkscrew is probably the gadget that I can't live without.

A pen on paper is the ideal way for me. I am not really very comfortable with machines; I never learned to type very well.

I felt that in time simple stone tools would be found in early Pleistocene in England.

Technology has been defined, perhaps a little ungenerously, as "a long Greek name for a bag of tools".

I still use felt tip pens for my notes, on a white board that I carry around with me. I am not into the computer technology - you can say that quite safely.

I'm very primitive; I write with a pen.

Consider the wheelbarrow. It may lack the grace of an airplane, the speed of an automobile, the initial capacity of a freight car, but its humble wheel marked out the path of what civilization we still have.

I write with a pen and paper. Never on a laptop.

I am not one of the new media experts working all the time with my computers and the PowerPoint's and things of that sort. So, I'm an old fashioned still in this regard but these are the moment where I really can be creative, if I am, to be left alone with just a book and piece of paper and to be thinking.

In my life there are not that many questions I can't properly deal with using my $40 adding machine and dog-eared compound interest table.

The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper.

All that was required to measure the planet was a man with a stick and a brain. In other words, couple an intellect with some experimental apparatus and almost anything seems achievable.

While there are many varieties of grills, each with their own virtues to be sure, I prefer the standard Weber kettle grill. Don't be fooled into thinking that you need any fancy gadgets in order to take advantage of cooking over a live fire. Just a good set of tongs and you're set.

I mean if we even had a wheelbarrow, that would be something.

Some people design buildings and aircraft carriers and cars - and I designed picks.

I found a way of working which pleased me because I didn’t have to frighten people with heavy equipment. It was that little black box and me.

Blogs are the main exception I make in my aversion to complex machinery.

Even the simplest tools can empower people to do great things.

Eratosthenes's only tools were sticks, eyes, feet, and brains; plus a zest for experiment. With those tools he correctly deduced the circumference of the Earth, to high precision, with an error of only a few percent. That's pretty good figuring for 2200 years ago.