20th-century Engineer Quotes

Enterprise Engineering is defined as that body of knowledge, principles, and practices having to do with the analysis, design, implementation and operation of an enterprise. In a continually changing and unpredictable competitive environment, the Enterprise Engineer addresses a fundamental question: how to design and improve all elements associated with the total enterprise through the use of engineering and analysis methods and tools to more effectively achieve its goals and objectives...

Donald H. Liles

By long-standing tradition, I take this opportunity to savage other
designers in the thin disguise of good, clean fun.

The principles governing the behavior of systems are not widely understood.

Jay Wright Forrester

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".

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

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!

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.

It's a shame that we humans are never able to pull in the same direction... [n]ot even when confronted by infinity.

Nuclear fusion of light elements like hydrogen or helium would permit approaching the speed of light. It seems very attractive to refuel your space ships where the fuel is.

Wilson Greatbatch

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.

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

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

Harold Eugene Edgerton

The modern engineer's primary concern should be that of designing and creating the things that society needs, and the spark of genius must be nurtured and developed to the maximum extent.

Eric A. Walker (engineer)

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

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

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

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.

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.

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."

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.