Engineering Quotes

Philosophy in its old form could exist only in the absence of engineering, but with engineering in existence and daily more active and far reaching, the old verbalistic philosophy and metaphysics have lost their reason to exist. They were no more able to understand the "production" of the universe and life than they are now able to understand or grapple with "production" as a means to provide a happier existence for humanity. They failed because their venerated method of "speculation" can not produce, and its place must be taken by mathematical thinking. Mathematical reasoning is displacing metaphysical reasoning. Engineering is driving verbalistic philosophy out of existence and humanity gains decidedly thereby. Only a few parasites and "speculators" will mourn the disappearance of their old companion "speculation." The world of producers -the predominating majority of human beings- will welcome a philosophy of ordered thought and production.

Alfred Korzybski

If I were king, I would redress an abuse which cuts back, as it were, one half of human kind. I would have women participate in all human rights, especially those of the mind.

Émilie Du Châtelet

When Henry Ford decided to produce his famous V-8 motor, he chose to build an engine with the entire eight cylinders cast in one block, and instructed his engineers to produce a design for the engine. The design was placed on paper, but the engineers agreed, to a man, that it was simply impossible to cast an eight-cylinder engine-block in one piece.Ford replied,''Produce it anyway.

Henry Ford

On a world built to ordered specification, there was no logical reason for such a mountain to exist. Yet every world should have at least one unclimbable mountain.

Larry Niven

Ask Gandhi, and eye for an eye makes us both blind.....ask an engineer, and the numbers don't lie - the first to strike wins.

Steven Ivy Attorney Entrepreneur

Expertise in a subfield was the key to a successful career as an engineer, and expertise was becoming a necessity for the mathematicians and computers as well.

Margot Lee Shetterly

Math is my Passion. Engineering is my Profession.

Wilfred James Dolor

On Mars, the joke went, a man’s hole was his castle where values of castle approached dorm room.

James S.A. Corey

Great triumphs of engineering genius—the locomotive, the truss bridge, the steel rail— ... are rather invention than engineering proper.

Arthur Mellen Wellington

Conjugation of the irregular verb “to design”:I create, You interfere, He gets in the way.We cooperate, You obstruct, They conspire.

David K. Brown

Incurable diseases will eventually force mankind to justify disruptive nanotech and genetic engineering.

Toba Beta

For Commander Ripley Jones, it was becoming more and more troublesome. It had been said that nothing is infallible, Antares apparently being the proof. After hastily recalling all crew and leaving Spacedock 7 thirty hours ago, there had been nothing but problems. Breakdowns in the sensors and telemetry, system failures of a wide variety and finally – the Last Straw: a coupling seal in the stardrive engine failed. Fortunately the cut-out worked, or the whole of engineering would’ve disappeared in a flaming ball of anti-matter. Five crewmen were seriously injured as it was. Commander Smith, the Chief Entech, had the offending unit stripped down and under repair. They were currently on conversion drive - which could only propel them at sub-light speeds – and Ripley was currently in an elevator with a very pissed Captain Falconer.

Christina Engela

Nothing is easier than yesterday's solutions.

Roger Sperry

There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, as least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won’t fall down or airplanes that won’t suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don’t want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls until it hits the ground. That’s all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the campus.

Neal Stephenson

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.

Steven Johnson

All we know about the new economic world tells us that nations which train engineers will prevail over those which train lawyers. No nation has ever sued its way to greatness.

Richard Lamm

An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

Donald Ervin Knuth

Inventions are smarter than their inventors

Larrie D. Ferreiro

Engineering is not only study of 45 subjects but it is moral studies of intellectual life.

Prakhar Srivastav

A pessimist says the glass is half empty, an optimist says the glass is half full, and an engineer says the glass is too big.

Scott Edward Shjefte

It did occur to him that perhaps he’d gone to the wrong Academy – the guys in the Space Fleet always had more interesting stories to tell at the spaceport bars. You know, tales about the dude who got vaporized in a plasma accident in the engineering section, or the fella who got turned into a blob of weird space jelly by some alien virus – or the time someone flew a starship into an astor-field at warp four by mistake (they were still trying to find the black box on that one). The Imperial Space Fleet’s recruiting office sure didn’t go around advertising ‘Join up, see the universe, meet interesting aliens and die screaming’, but it was known there were risks involved. It was part of the job after all, and yet somehow, they still got recruits signing up in droves. Yes, indeedy – the stories were far more interesting than his – took a load of ore to Gorda, took a load of mining equipment back to Tordrazil. Took a load of Florpavian Flame-birds to a zoo on Deanna, took a load of machinery to Salus. Picked up and dropped off a few passengers on the way. Still, Florpavian Flame-birds were a risky cargo… and damned tricky to transport – which is probably the only reason he’d had any entertainment at all on the last trip.

Christina Engela

One of my friends compared me to Bruce Banner, due to my work with radiation and human health. So I looked up Bruce Banner and this is what I found: Banner, a physicist, is sarcastic and seemingly very self-assured when he first appears in Incredible Hulk #1, but is also emotionally withdrawn in most fashions...Banner is considered one of the greatest scientific minds on Earth, possessing "a mind so brilliant it cannot be measured on any known intelligence test." He holds expertise in biology, chemistry, engineering, physiology, and nuclear physics.

Steven Magee

The Fukushima nuclear complex went on to become the worst man-made engineering disaster in all of human history, outside of war.

Steven Magee

One man’s “magic” is another man’s engineering. “Supernatural” is a null word.

Robert A. Heinlein

Are engineers better at business than business people? It’s debatable. Business people certainly seems to have bigger houses, drive fancier cars, wear nicer clothes and have better looking mates. Engineers lack the time management skills to spend that kind of money. They waste all their time inventing ways to make the most money in the quickest, most efficient way possible. And then when they figure it out, they optimize the process.

raul perez

In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a large consignment of ideas. 'We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others,' writes La Rochefoucauld in an aphorism which transports us with an energy and exactitude comparable to that of Maillard bridge. The Swiss engineer reduces the number of supports just as the French writer compacts into a single line what lesser minds might have taken pages to express. We delight in complexity to which genius has lent an appearance of simplicity. (p 207)

Alain de Botton

If automating everything makes people lazier and lazier, and laziness leads to stupidity, which it does for most people, judging by the current content circulating the social networks everywhere, except North Korea, where they don’t have any internet to speak of - at some point the Japanese robots, for which a market niche is currently being developed, with no concerns on how they should be designed to act in society or outside it - will have no choice, but to take everything over, to preserve us from ourselves…

Will Advise

Character is like 'Structural Integrity' in the field of engineering.A construction is believed to have structural integrity when it can withstand 'impact' from anywhere and anything, functioning adequately for its desired purposes and service life, until a physical collapse proves otherwise.'Integrity' springs from the original Latin root 'integrum', which means "Intact".A man has INTEGRITY when he remains INTACT, despite the IMPACT of forces that seek to sidetrack him.He will never confuse "what is" with "what ought to be", EVEN WHEN "what is" will work in his favour.A man who will choose, not what the world forces his hands to choose, but what aligns with his destiny and will propel him to become what he is meant to become.Such men are few, such men should be me and you.

Olaotan Fawehinmi

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.

William Gibson

I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.

Ayn Rand

Mister Geoffrey, my experiment shows that the dynamo and the bulb are both working properly," I said. "So why won't the radio play?""I don't know," he said. "Try connecting them here."He was pointing toward a socket on the radio labeled "AC," and when I shoved the wires inside, the radio came to life. We shouted with excitement. As I pedaled the bicycle, I could hear the great Billy Kaunda playing his happy music on Radio Two, and that made Geoffrey start to dance."Keep pedaling," he said. "That's it, just keep pedaling.""Hey, I want to dance, too.""You'll have to wait your turn."Without realizing it, I'd just discovered the difference between alternating and direct current. Of course, I wouldn't know what this meant until much later.After a few minutes of pedaling this upside-down bike by hand, my arm grew tired and the radio slowly died. So I began thinking, "What can do the pedaling for us so Geoffrey and I can dance?

William Kamkwamba

A societal revolution is politically organic in nature. It can't be engineered. It has to be evolved.

Mamur Mustapha

Unfortunately, humans have a long history of trying to fix their engineering mistakes with more engineering mistakes!

Steven Magee

Engineering is the continuation of politics by other means

Larrie D. Ferreiro

Kevyn, Ennesby tells me you are building a time machine.Actually I'm finished.In one afternoon? Wow... Does it work?After a fashion....I put a whole lot of energy into it, and the next thing I knew it was time for dinner.-Captain Tagon & Commander Andreyasn

Howard Tayler

In accordance with the prevailing conceptions in the U.S., there is no infringement on democracy if a few corporations control the information system: in fact, that is the essence of democracy. In the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the leading figure of the public relations industry, Edward Bernays, explains that “the very essence of the democratic process” is “the freedom to persuade and suggest,” what he calls “the engineering of consent.” “A leader,” he continues, “frequently cannot wait for the people to arrive at even general understanding … Democratic leaders must play their part in … engineering … consent to socially constructive goals and values,” applying “scientific principles and tried practices to the task of getting people to support ideas and programs”; and although it remains unsaid, it is evident enough that those who control resources will be in a position to judge what is “socially constructive,” to engineer consent through the media, and to implement policy through the mechanisms of the state. If the freedom to persuade happens to be concentrated in a few hands, we must recognize that such is the nature of a free society.

Noam Chomsky

But remember this, Japanese boy... airplanes are not tools for war. They are not for making money. Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality.

Hayao Miyazaki

Women, on the other hand, had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations.

Margot Lee Shetterly

Scientists and inventors of the USA (especially in the so-called "blue state" that voted overwhelmingly against Trump) have to think long and hard whether they want to continue research that will help their government remain the world's superpower. All the scientists who worked in and for Germany in the 1930s lived to regret that they directly helped a sociopath like Hitler harm millions of people. Let us not repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Piero Scaruffi

We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps.

Carl Sagan

Stephenson had large wrought-iron boiler plates available and he also had the courage of his calculations... The idea found its best-known expression in the Menai railway bridge opened in 1850. Stephenson's beams, which weighed 1,500 tons each, were built beside the Straits and were floated into position between the towers on rafts across a swirling tide. They were raised rather over a hundred feet up the towers by successive lifts with primitive hydraulic jacks. All this was not done without both apprehension and adventure; they were giants on the earth in those days.

J.E. Gordon

The fewer moving parts, the better." "Exactly. No truer words were ever spoken in the context of engineering.

Christian Cantrell

To be a good professional engineer,always start to study late for exams.Because it teaches you how tomanage time and tackle emergencies.

Aamir Sarfraz (aamir rajput khan)

Women, on the other hand, had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations.

Margot Lee Shetterly

Piero Scaruffi

Carl Sagan

J.E. Gordon

The fewer moving parts, the better." "Exactly. No truer words were ever spoken in the context of engineering.

Christian Cantrell

To be a good professional engineer,always start to study late for exams.Because it teaches you how tomanage time and tackle emergencies.

Aamir Sarfraz (aamir rajput khan)

Don't be average and lazy, If you want to successes you should work hard to achieve it

Aymen Tmar

Each type of knowledge has value; however, from an engineering point of view, practical knowledge seems to be more valuable than theoretical knowledge.

Eraldo Banovac

Engineering Quotes

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