There is no term comparable to green thumbs to apply to such a mechanic, but there should be. For there are men who can look, listen, tap, make an adjustment, and a machine works.

When I write, I use an Underwood #5 made in 1920. Someone gave me an electric typewriter, but there's no use pretending you can use machinery that thinks faster than you do. An electric typewriter is ready to go before I have anything to say.

If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the pushbutton finger.

Great engines turn on small pivots.

Like all country boys they revered machines and understood them.

Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.

The way to get killed around machinery was to take things for granted.

You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.

It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.

You can't make anything idiot proof because idiots are so ingenious.

Look long on an engine. It is sweet to the eyes.

The arithmetical machine produces effects that approach nearer to thought than all the actions of animals. But it does nothing that would enable us to attribute will to it, as to the animals.

We cannot get grace from gadgets.