Quotes About Tools

Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.

The tools I learned photographing celebrities, now I want to use them to sell ideas.

The skill-providers want to have more impact and solve problems; the problem people want new tools to get their problems solved.

Hands were such extraordinary tools, she mused. Tools, weapons, clumsy and deft, numb and tactile. Among tribal hunters, they could speak, a flurry of gestures eloquent in silence. But they could not taste. Could not hear. Could not weep. For all that, they killed so easily.

Excuses are the tools with which persons with no purpose in view build for themselves great monuments of nothing.

But mostly people hacked Tools to Make Tools. Or games. And they would come into computer stores to show off their hacks.

The art of creating tools is essentially superhuman-either divine or demoniac (for the smith also forges murderous weapons).

The shovel is brother to the gun.

A] lawyer without books would be like a workman without tools.

Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning, but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.

and men of science,' cries dixon, 'may be but the simple tools of others, with no more idea of what they are about, than a hammer knows of a house.

The purpose of education is to give the student the intellectual tools to analyze, whether verbally or numerically, and to reach conclusions based on logic and evidence.

A man's nothing without his tools.

When we released JUnit 4 recently we spent nearly half of our engineering budget on reducing the cost of deployment for our clients. We tried to make sure that new-style tests would work with old tools and old-style tests would work with new tools. We also worked to make sure we had the freedom to make future changes to JUnit without breaking client code.

Nothing is more vulnerable and ephemeral than scientific theories, which are mere tools and not everlasting truths.

Digital minimalism definitively does not reject the innovations of the internet age, but instead rejects the way so many people currently engage with these tools.

Our sociality is simply far too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages & emojis. Any digital minimalist must confront this reality & manage his or her relationship with these tools accordingly. [...] The key is the intention behind what you decide, not necessarily its details.

By working backward from their deep values to their technology choices, digital minimalists transform these innovations from a source of distraction into tools to support a life well lived. By doing so, they break the spell that has made so many people feel like they're losing control to their screens.

Part of what makes this philosophy so effective is that the very act of being selective about your tools will bring you satisfaction, typically much more than what is lost from the tools you decide to avoid.

Throughout history, skilled laborers have applied sophistication and skepticism to their encounters with new tools and their decisions about whether to adopt them. There's no reason why knowledge workers cannot do the same when it comes to the Internet—the fact that the skilled labor here now involves digital bits doesn't change this reality.

As a computer scientist, I make a living helping to advance the cutting edge of the digital world. Like many in my field, I'm enthralled by the possibilities of our techno-future. But I'm also convinced that we cannot unlock this potential until we put in the effort required to take control of our own digital lives — to confidently decide for ourselves what tools we want to use, for what reason, and under what conditions.

Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value—not as sources of value themselves.

I call it digital minimalism, and it applies the belief that less can be more to our relationship with digital tools.

In my work on this topic, I've become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.