Engineer Quotes

Remember that the Clerget lands very fast, at over forty miles an hour, and with that great engine in the nose the tail was light. Watch it... Lovely.

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 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.

Advancement of the human factor in industry... varies so much that unless we use measurement and abide by the results, there is no possibility of repeating the process accurately and efficiently at will, or of predicting and controlling the future conditions that assure that advancement.

Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr.

All benefits of the sales of the American version of this book that I wrote... will be for the 90th Division Veterans Association, now and forever.

I only just hint this to show what use this engine may be put to in working of mills, especially where coals are cheap. I have only this to urge, that water in its fall from any determinate height, has simply a force answerable and equal to the force that raises it.

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.

To define it rudely but not inaptly, [engineering] is the art of doing that well with one dollar which any bungler can do with two after a fashion.

Arthur M. Wellington

I would say that failure to terraform Mars constitutes failure to live up to our human nature and a betrayal of our responsibility as members of the community of life itself

The increase of this efficiency is essentially the problem of the manager, and the amount to which it can be increased by proper study is, in most cases, so great as to be almost incredible.

The Engineer is one who, in the world of physics and applied sciences, begets new things, or adapts old things to new and better uses; above all, one who, in that field, attains new results in the best way and at lowest cost.

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

Engineering is superficial only to those who view it superficially. At the heart of engineering lies existential joy.

Samuel C. Florman

… as the world rapidly becomes a civilization of machines, the masters of machines will increasingly be the ones in control of the world.

John Howard Dellinger

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

As the component parts of all new machines may be said to be old[,] it is a nice discriminating judgment, which discovers that a particular arrangement will produce a new and desired effect.... Therefore, the mechanic should sit down among levers, screws, wedges, wheels, etc. like a poet among the letters of the alphabet, considering them as the exhibition of his thoughts; in which a new arrangement transmits a new idea to the world.

On owning a commercial TV franchise in Britain:

Like having a licence to print your own money.

He made a million pounds in the first year

Christopher Thomson, 1st Baron Thomson

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.

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

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

There are men of a certain type of mind who are never wearied with gibing at mathematics, at mathematicians, and at mathematical methods of inquiry. It goes almost without saying that these men have themselves little mathematical bent.

Oliver Heaviside

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