Quotes by Mechanical Engineers

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

We are both great men but I have succeeded better in keeping it a profound secret than he has.

We are all one. Only egos, beliefs, and fears separate us.

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

Nikola Tesla

One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

Nikola Tesla

It's me. I chose this. I chose all of this — this rock has been waiting for me my entire life. I’ve been moving towards it my whole life.

Aron Ralston

A woman hath nine lives like a cat.

John B. Heywood

If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.

Nikola Tesla

Science is the best idea humans have ever had.

Bill Nye

People love dogs. This is, I hope, the least surprising sentence you will read in this book. I myself have had long discussions with my dog friends, and by that I mean my friends who are dogs.

Bill Nye

I came from Paris in the Spring of 1884, and was brought in intimate contact with him [Thomas Edison]. We experimented day and night, holidays not excepted. His existence was made up of alternate periods of work and sleep in the laboratory. He had no hobby, cared for no sport or amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene. There can be no doubt that, if he had not married later a woman of exceptional intelligence, who made it the one object of her life to preserve him, he would have died many years ago from consequences of sheer neglect. So great and uncontrollable was his passion for work.

Nikola Tesla

If he [Thomas Edison] had a needle to find in a haystack, he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. … Just a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor.

Nikola Tesla

The recurrence of a phenomenon like [Thomas] Edison is not very likely. The profound change of conditions and the ever increasing necessity of theoretical training would seem to make it impossible. He will occupy a unique and exalted position in the history of his native land, which might well be proud of his great genius and undying achievements in the interest of humanity.

Nikola Tesla

Would ye both eat your cake and have your cake?

John B. Heywood

...I suspect everyone there can reason along the lines I described...It's just that when it comes to evolution, and especially to the related realization that we are all pretty small bits of the universe, it seems as though Ham and his followers just can't handle the truth. They throw aside their common sense and cling to the hope that there's something that makes it okay to *not* think for themselves.""The irony is, in the process they are walking away from our ability to understand who we are, where we came from, and how we fit into a cosmos...If there is something divine in our nature, something that sets humans apart from all creatures, surely our ability to reason is a key part of it. The irony is, in the process they are walking away from our ability to understand who we are, where we came from, and how we fit into a cosmos...If there is something divine in our nature, something that sets humans apart from all creatures, surely our ability to reason is a key part of it.

Bill Nye

Every question leads to new answers, new discoveries, and new smarter questions.

Bill Nye

The(re is no) End

Bill Nye

There really is, for humankind there’s really no such thing as race. There’s different tribes but not different races. We’re all one species.

Bill Nye The Science Guy

We are all one race. The only difference is the color of our skin, and that comes from how close your ancestors lived to the Equator or at high altitudes like Tibetans. There have always been tribes, but what we have to appreciate now is that we live in a global community. And tribal loyalties…they’re not relevant to our future.

Bill Nye The Science Guy

Now the soft-voiced gentle woman of my reverent worship has all but vanished, in her place has come the woman who thinks that her chief success in life lies in making herself as much as possible like man—in dress, voice and actions, in sports and achievements of every kind.

Nikola Tesla

Now the soft-voiced gentle woman of my reverent worship has all but vanished.

Nikola Tesla

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct, Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.

Nikola Tesla

Everyone that you'll ever met wil know someone that you won't

Bill Nye

The idea of atomic energy is illusionary but it has taken so powerful a hold on the minds, that although I have preached against it for twenty-five years, there are still some who believe it to be realizable.

Nikola Tesla

The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter—for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way.

Nikola Tesla

Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific discoveries and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere 'stick' in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.Progress along such lines will be impossible while nations persist in the savage practice of killing each other off. I inherited from my father, an erudite man who labored hard for peace, an ineradicable hatred of war.

Nikola Tesla

You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.

Nikola Tesla

The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.

Nikola Tesla

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain.

Nikola Tesla

When a child is born its sense-organs are brought in contact with the outer world. The waves of sound, heat and light beat upon its feeble body, its sensitive nerve-fibres quiver, the muscles contract and relax in obedience: a gasp, a breath, and in this act a marvelous little engine, of inconceivable delicacy and complexity of construction, unlike any on earth, is hitched to the wheel-work of the Universe.

Nikola Tesla

Edison was by far the most successful and, probably, the last exponent of the purely empirical method of investigation. Everything he achieved was the result of persistent trials and experiments often performed at random but always attesting extraordinary vigor and resource. Starting from a few known elements, he would make their combinations and permutations, tabulate them and run through the whole list, completing test after test with incredible rapidity until he obtained a clue. His mind was dominated by one idea, to leave no stone unturned, to exhaust every possibility.

Nikola Tesla

I am part of a light, and it is the music. The Light fills my six senses: I see it, hear, feel, smell, touch and think. Thinking of it means my sixth sense. Particles of Light are written note. O bolt of lightning can be an entire sonata. A thousand balls of lightening is a concert.. For this concert I have created a Ball Lightning, which can be heard on the icy peaks of the Himalayas.

Nikola Tesla

I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.

Nikola Tesla

War can not be avoided until the physical cause for its recurrence is removed and this, in the last analysis, is the vast extent of the planet on which we live.

Nikola Tesla

Fights between individuals, as well as governments and nations, invariably result from misunderstandings in the broadest interpretation of this term. Misunderstandings are always caused by the inability of appreciating one another's point of view. This again is due to the ignorance of those concerned, not so much in their own, as in their mutual fields. The peril of a clash is aggravated by a more or less predominant sense of combativeness, posed by every human being. To resist this inherent fighting tendency the best way is to dispel ignorance of the doings of others by a systematic spread of general knowledge. With this object in view, it is most important to aid exchange of thought and intercourse.

Nikola Tesla

History is but the record of the public and official acts of human beings. It is our object, therefore, to humanize our history and deal with people past and present; people who ate and possibly drank; people who were born, flourished and died; not grave tragedians, posing perpetually for their photographs.

Bill Nye

When I was a boy of seven or eight I read a novel untitled "Abafi" — The Son of Aba — a Servian translation from the Hungarian of Josika, a writer of renown. The lessons it teaches are much like those of "Ben Hur," and in this respect it might be viewed as anticipatory of the work of Wallace. The possibilities of will-power and self-control appealed tremendously to my vivid imagination, and I began to discipline myself. Had I a sweet cake or a juicy apple which I was dying to eat I would give it to another boy and go through the tortures of Tantalus, pained but satisfied. Had I some difficult task before me which was exhausting I would attack it again and again until it was done. So I practiced day by day from morning till night. At first it called for a vigorous mental effort directed against disposition and desire, but as years went by the conflict lessened and finally my will and wish became identical.

Nikola Tesla

Of all things, I liked books best.

Nikola Tesla

It's survival of the hang-in-there's, or the made-the-cuts, or the just good-enoughs.

Bill Nye

Science is the key to our future, and if you don’t believe in science, then you’re holding everybody back. And it’s fine if you as an adult want to run around pretending or claiming that you don’t believe in evolution, but if we educate a generation of people who don’t believe in science, that’s a recipe for disaster. We talk about the Internet. That comes from science. Weather forecasting. That comes from science. The main idea in all of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong.

Bill Nye

Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.

Nikola Tesla

The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.

Nikola Tesla

It's survival of the hang-in-there's, or the made-the-cuts, or the just good-enoughs.

Bill Nye

Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.

Nikola Tesla

The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.

Nikola Tesla

Science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without. Owing to the similarity of our construction and the sameness of our environment, we respond in like manner to similar stimuli, and from the concordance of our reactions, understanding is born. In the course of ages, mechanisms of infinite complexity are developed, but what we call 'soul' or 'spirit,' is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the 'soul' or the 'spirit' ceases likewise.I expressed these ideas long before the behaviorists, led by Pavlov in Russia and by Watson in the United States, proclaimed their new psychology. This apparently mechanistic conception is not antagonistic to an ethical conception of life.

Nikola Tesla

Life is and will ever remain an equation incapable of solution, but it contains certain known factors.

Nikola Tesla

We crave for new sensations but soon become indifferent to them. The wonders of yesterday are today common occurrences

Nikola Tesla