Engineer Quotes

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.

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.

Engineering is the art of directing the great sources of power in nature for the use and convenience of man.

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.

The men who miss success have two general alibis: 'I'm not a genius' is one; and the other, 'There aren't the opportunities today there used to be'.

Charles M. Schwab
Charles M. Schwab
In general the problems of civil engineers are given to them by God Almighty. They are the problems of nature. On the other hand mechanical and electrical work has problems which man, to a certain extent, has created for himself.

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.

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
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
Verghese Kurien
Some people will say that a respect for regulations is essential and that engineers need not check the hypotheses on which they are based. This is a convenient theory, but a false one. Men who draw up regulations can be wrong like other men.

I have no knowledge other than that gained through my own eyes.

To ordinary minds all creation is mystery; to cultivated minds there is much that is not quite inexplicable.

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.

Modern science constitutes a method for understanding and modifying the world but has no inherent direction, whereas modern religion describes a messianic world view but lacks a useful method to bring about this state of affairs.

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.

The all-important word to the engineer is WHY, and it is astonishing how few people in the ordinary pursuits of human affairs ever think it worthwhile to trouble themselves about that question, or to make much effort to find out whether the answer suggested will bear analysis.

William Le Roy Emmet
William Le Roy Emmet
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."

Work is the universal topic; the weather is too serious a subject to chatter about lightly.

Francis Hopkinson Smith
Francis Hopkinson Smith
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.

Paul Baran
Paul Baran
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.

Responsibility-driven design is inspired by the client/server model. It focuses on the contract by asking: What actions is this object responsible for? and What information does this object share?

Playing catch-up with the competition can only ever help you make incremental gains. It will never help you create something new.

Eric Schmidt
Eric Schmidt
I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.

Rob Pike
Rob Pike