Engineer Quotes

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

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.

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".

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

Factories today are being run less and less by the authority of experience only, and more and more by the authority of figures and facts. The superintendent and manager of long experience and intuitive knowledge only is forced to make room for the younger man, of less experience, perhaps, but who modernizes his work by the jurisdiction of figures alone.

Clinton Edgar Woods

Somebody once said, 'He's never wrong about the future, but he does tend to be wrong about how long it takes.

I am well convinced that Aerial Navigation will form a most prominent feature in the progress of civilization.

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

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

Having probes in space was like having a cataract removed.

Each new discovery leaves in the brains of men seeds which make it possible for an ever-increasing number of minds of new generations to embrace even greater scientific concepts.

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.

The art of the novel, however, has fallen into such a state of stagnation - a lassitude acknowledged and discussed by the whole of critical opinion - that it is hard to imagine such an art can survive for long without some radical change. To many, the solution seems simple enough: such a change being impossible, the art of the novel is dying.

Alain Robbe-Grillet

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.

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

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.

Experience alone can teach us the best forms of construction for sailing apparatus in order that they may be of sufficient strength, very light, and most easily managed.

Otto Lilienthal

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.

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

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.

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

Managers' typical response to my argument about free time is, 'That's all well and good, but there are things I have to do.' Yet we waste so much time in unproductive activity—it takes an enormous effort on the part of the leader to keep free time for the truly important things.

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

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

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