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!.

Only a certain probability remains of a one-to-one association of any spatial feature now with a similar feature a moment later. It is sheer luck, in a sense, that any physical apparatus stays put, for the laws of quantum mechanics allow it a finite, though small, probability of dispersing while one is not looking, or even while one is.

Lancelot Law Whyte

We consider an organization to be a set of constraints on the activities performed by agents. This view follows that of Weber, who views the process of bureaucratization as a shift from management based on self-interest and personalities to one based on rules and procedures.

Mark S. Fox | Michael Gruninger

Women think that an engineer is a man in hip boots building a dam. They don't realize that 95 percent of engineering is done in a nice air-conditioned office.

It is easier to distinguish between the "scientific function" and the "engineering function" than to distinguish between the man who should be called a scientist and [he] who should be termed an engineer. Many men perform both functions, and do it very well.

William Littell Everitt

You keep returning to the thought that only very thin walls separate you from the deathly cold and incomprehensible emptiness of space, which can extinguish life instantly and piteously.

Oleg Grigoryevich Makarov

Engineering drawings are expressed in a graphic language, the grammar and syntax of which are learned through use; it also has idioms that only initiates will recognize. And because the drawings are neatly made and produced on large sheets of paper, they exhume an air of great authority and definitive completeness.

Eugene S. Ferguson

The greatest damage done by advertising is precisely that it incessantly demonstrates the prostitution of men and women who lend their intellects, their voices, their artistic skills to purposes in which they themselves do not believe and that it teaches the essential meaninglessness of all creations of the mind; words, images and ideas.

if tachyons are one day discovered... the day before the momentous occasion a notice from the discoverers should appear in newspapers announcing "tachyons have been discovered tomorrow."

You can drink pickle juice and imitate gorillas and do silly dances and sing stupid songs and wear funny hats and be as imperfect as you please and still be a good person. Good people are hard to find nowadays. And they're a lot more fun than perfect people any day of the week.

Analogies are useful for analysis in unexplored fields. By means of analogies an unfamiliar system may be compared with one that is better known. The relations and actions are more easily visualized, the mathematics more readily applied, and the analytical solutions more readily obtained in the familiar system.

There is an unfailing joy in identifying oneself with the actual sites where great things happened long ago. It appeals to a very human trait in all of us.

Ralph Alger Bagnold

In every crisis, if you look carefully, you will spot an opportunity. My insistence is on finding and seizing that opportunity. I never try to side-step a crisis. Rather, the more monstrous the crises, the more I am tempted to rush at it, grasp it by the horns and man-oeuvre it until it gives me what I want

Verghese Kurien

Because of our superficial self-awareness, we often wonder where an idea in our heads came from. Some people imagine that these thoughts and feelings come directly from agencies outside their own minds; they incline towards a belief in haunted heads.

K. Eric Drexler

I love the drawing board because most of the work I do is of half scale, so I can have the complete car in front of me, whereas the CAD system limits you to the size of the screen.

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.

Mark Twain had it backwards. Nowadays everybody is doing something about the weather, but nobody is talking about it.

Stephen Schneider

Innovation is the process of turning ideas into manufacturable and marketable form.

Sadly, the deadly impact of the pandemic has been made worse by the absence of a global coordinated effort. In the memory of those two million souls, the world must act with far greater solidarity.

António Guterres

There can be no absolute reality, there can be no absolute truth.

So, here we are - all part of this great hologram called Creation, which is everybody else's SELF.It's all a cosmic play, and there is nothing but you!

The fifth century BC historian Herodotus called Egypt 'the gift of the Nile'. The Egyptians themselves went a lot further. They claimed that their sacred river had its source among the stars.

In many ways, unexpected results are what have most inspired my photography.

Harold Eugene Edgerton

Socrates was a philosopher. He went around pointing out errors in the way things were done. They fed him hemlock.