20th-century Engineer Quotes

Linus Torvalds

Wernher von Braun

Alain Robbe-Grillet

António Guterres

Hannes Alfvén

Douglas Engelbart

Eric Schmidt

You can be good at technology and like fashion and art. You can be good at technology and be a jock. You can be good at technology and be a mom. You can do it your way, on your terms.

Marketing is far too important to be left only to the marketing department!.

Having probes in space was like having a cataract removed.

[Netscape will soon reduce Windows to] a poorly debugged set of device drivers.

Marc Andreessen

The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal, and in 1776, that's exactly what they meant. Women could not vote, women could not own property, and blacks were considered property. After 200 years of enlightenment, we have realized that gender and race are inappropriate distinctions for determining who has individual rights. Anytime Gov gives you permission they let you know that you have permission by giving you a permit or a license. If you have a marriage license, what permission do you have to do now that you did not have permission to do before, who gave you that permission, and who gave them the authority to give you that permission in the first place?

Michael Badnarik

This decade holds many changes for the United States, but the greatest needs regarding America's productivity in the 1990s, are better education and employee training.

Gregory Balestrero

I've got tears in my ears from lyin' on my back
In my bed while I cry over you.
And the tears in my ears, they're off the beaten track
Since you said "It's goodbye, we are through".

Of the four project development variables - scope, cost, time and quality - quality isn't really a free variable. The only possible values are "excellent" and "insanely excellent", depending on whether lives are at stake.

In 1492 Columbus knew less about the far Atlantic than we do about the heavens, yet he chose not to sail with a flotilla of less than three ships.... So it is with interplanetary exploration: it must be done on the grand scale.

Wernher von Braun

In 1980, business at my company, Chuck E. Cheese's, was thriving and I was feeling flush. So I bought a very large house on the Champ de Mars in Paris, right between the Eiffel Tower and the Ecole Militaire. The home was quite amazing: At six stories, it spanned 15,000 square feet and featured marble staircases and a swimming pool in the basement.

I talk to myself through the computer. I ask myself questions, leave things to be looked at again, things that you would do with a notepad. It turns out today that it's much better today to do with a personal computer rather than a notepad.

The only way to make it clear to him that he should not come here to our lists in the future, is to teach him a hard lesson, and that is done by continually re-adding cc's back to him — because the mails talk about him — even when his friends come our mailing lists and delete the his address from the cc list. Like this message, which adds him back in. Richard, you are a lying cheating hypocrite.

Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day.

For the most part, these are not new lessons, but lessons learned in different circumstances and surroundings. The fact that they are not new is of course a lesson in itself — we must continually strive to benefit from past experiences and structure our management so that past related experience can be brought to bear on current problems.

Humanity faces the most complex task of its history so far. Stated in a solution-oriented way, it is necessary gradually to reorganize this planet at two levels. One must deal with the competing necessities of biosphere and mankind with all their environmental and climatic consequences. On the other level, it is necessary to resolve the demands of competing nations and worlds within mankind's hierarchy of socioeconomic developmental levels and the "Christmas tree" of sociopolitical, ideological, and military consequences.

Krafft Arnold Ehricke

The key thing about all the world's big problems is that they have to be dealt with collectively. If we don't get collectively smarter, we're doomed.

Douglas Engelbart

When education and resources are available to all without a price tag, there will be no limit to the human potential.

While there is a reasonable possibility that a peacetime armed force could be entirely voluntary, I am certain that an armed force involved in a major conflict could not be voluntary

Crawford Greenewalt

Looking back to data, we can see if the consequences are plausible; looking forward to theory, we can see if general principles are suggested.

John Henry Holland

I've reached the age where young people frequently ask for my advice. All I can really say is that electronics is a fascinating field that I continue to find fulfilling. The field is still growing rapidly, and the opportunities that are ahead are at least as great as they were when I graduated from college. My advice is to get involved and get started.

A normal chap, a man who likes creating things. A good worker in the morning, and a man who likes enjoying himself in the afternoon.

Ferruccio Lamborghini

In the near future, the web is going to be the master copy of human knowledge. We need to figure out ways to use that knowledge.

Håkon Wium Lie

By separating the function of adaptation from the function of maintaining the integrity of individual genes, sex allows much greater diversity while still keeping genes whole. Sex is not only fun, it is good engineering practice.

When you do dome up with a solution, you can always explain it logically, even though it's the absurd approach that gave you the solution.

When Commodore acquired Amiga in 1984, the legion of Amiga loyalists thought the world would beat a path to the better-mousetrap door. It didn't happen. The Amiga languished.