Tool Making Quotes

Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.

Chimps can do all sorts of things we thought that only we could do - like tool-making and abstraction and generalisation. They can learn a language - sign language - and they can use the signs. But when you think of our intellects, even the brightest chimp looks like a very small child.

There is great satisfaction in a well-made clean tool that does its work well.

The uniqueness of humans has been claimed on many grounds, but most often because of our tool-making, culture, language, reason and morality. We have them, the other animals don't, and -- so the argument goes -- that's that.

Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.

Man is a tool-using animal.

I don't think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our ancestors, there was a gradual expansion of the brain; there was an expansion of the complexity of tools.

Human beings are tool-making animals. Since the prehistoric era, we have created and used a wide variety of objects. But now a significant change is about to occur. In the near future, we will simply become another object that can be monitored, tracked and controlled within a vast machine.

Everything you use in a modern life style has to be made using a tool of some sort.

Tools were made and born were hands, Every farmer understands.

Today, there are over 7,000 languages spoken throughout the world. They may sound different, but in every case, they're drawing on the same regions of the brain. If you had told me that stone-tool-making had something to do with our ability to speak, I would have said you've got rocks in your head, but the latest studies indicate that once Homo erectus got creative with stone, our brains were on the way to inventing the most powerful tool of all: language.

Stone tools are fossilized human behavior.

But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space.

When primeval man first used flint stones for any purpose, he would have accidentally splintered them, and would then have used the sharp fragments. From this step it would be a small one to break the flints on purpose and not a very wide step to fashion them rudely.

We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects...All our tool-making implies our belief in an ultimate tool.

In short, intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original feature, is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely varying the manufacture.

Certain anthropologists hold that man, having discovered tools, ceased to evolve biologically. Animals, never having discovered them, continue to fashion drills out of their beaks, oars out of their hind feet, wings out of their forefeet, suits of armor out of their hides, levers out of their horns, saws out of their teeth. Whether this be true or not, all authorities agree that man is the tool-using animal. It sets him off from the rest of the animal kingdom as drastically as does speech.

From the point where our ancestors started making tools, people have been unable to survive without the things they make; in this sense, it is making things that makes us human.

Our age is one in which usefulness is thought to be the chief merit of nature; in which the attainment of power, the utilization of its resources is taken to be the chief purpose of man in God's creation. Man has indeed become primarily a tool-making animal, and the world is now a gigantic tool box for the satisfaction of his needs.

The only thing I knew how to do without a lot of money was repairing tools. I actually started making and repairing tools for machines.

Our ape-like and arboreal ancestors entered upon the first of many short cuts. To crack a marrow-bone with a rock was the act which fathered the tool, and between the cracking of a marrow-bone and the riding down town in an automobile lies only a difference of degree.

I know it sounds odd, but I want to make a Rolex-quality screwdriver.

It is not speech or tool making that distinguishes us from other animals, it is imagination....Of what use are speech sounds and tools without an inspiration toward perfectibility, without a sense that we can create or construct a history.

For a million years the sound of making handaxes provided the percussion of everyday life. Anyone choosing a hundred objects to tell a history of the world would have to include a handaxe.