Top 543 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Engineers - Page 3

I believe that if the people of this nation fully understood what Congress has done to them over the last 49 years, they would move on Washington; they would not wait for an election....It adds up to a preconceived plan to destroy the economic and social independence of the United States!

It's a shame that we humans are never able to pull in the same direction . . . [n]ot even when confronted by infinity.

Regardless of whether you are an entrepreneur or whether you are an employee of a large company, the absolute prerequisite is that you must know your stuff. There is no substitute for this.

Who has not been amazed to learn that the function y = ex, like a phoenix rising from its own ashes, is its own derivative?

Cuba laments and expresses its profound sadness for the loss of so many innocent lives and expresses our absolute rejection of acts of terrorism, wherever they may come from.

Pyramids, cathedrals, and rockets exist not because of geometry, theories of structures, or thermodynamics, but because they were first a picture- literally a vision-in the minds of those who built them. Society is where it is today because people had the perception; the images and the imagination; the creativity that the Arts provide, to make the world the place we live in today.

A lie has always a certain amount of weight with those who wish to believe it.

There is no demand for women engineers, as such, as there are for women doctors; but there's always a demand for anyone who can do a good piece of work.

There's nothing nice about Steve Jobs and there's nothing evil about Bill Gates

The J3 Cub is the safest airplane in the world; it can just barely kill you.

At the present time, the alternative is not between change or no change, but between change for the better and change for the worse.

Friends are what God gives you to make up for your family.

Flying for the airlines is not supposed to be an adventure. From takeoff to landing, the autopilots handle the controls. This is routine. In a Boeing as much as an Airbus. And they make better work of it than any pilot can. You're not supposed to be the blue-eyed hero here. Your job is to make decisions, to stay awake, and to know which buttons to push and when. Your job is to manage the systems.

You want a valve that doesn't leak and you try everything possible to develop one. But the real world provides you with a leaky valve. You have to determine how much leakiness you can tolerate.

Time and happenings and the grace of God are the best solvers of puzzles. One must leave much to these, if he is not to worry himself into premature senility.

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.

Scientists study the world as it is, engineers create the world that never has been.

Innovation is the never-ending search for better solutions

I would rather do things that I really love with people that I love working with, and to be able to extend that and go and play, it's great. I feel very fortunate.

There is no hope for television by means of cathode-ray tubes.

The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work, and a Wiser World

When I looked in his eyes, I just kept on walking.

I came to realize that exaggerated concern about what others are doing can be foolish. It can paralyze effort, and stifle a good idea. One finds that in the history of science, almost every problem has been worked out by someone else. This should not discourage anyone from pursuing his own path.

Being the most striking manifestation of the art of metal structures by which our engineers have shown in Europe, it [the Eiffel Tower] is one of the most striking of our modern national genius.

Little did I know that I would be fortunate enough to develop several operating systems in my lifetime; developing one is a rare opportunity for anyone.

The only dumb question is the question you don't ask.

A good rule in organizational analysis is that no meeting of the minds is really reached until we talk of specific actions or decisions. We can talk of who is responsible for budgets, or inventory, or quality, but little is settled. It is only when we get down to the action words-measure, compute, prepare, check, endorse, recommend, approve-that we can make clear who is to do what.

The best meetings get real work done. When your people learn that your meetings actually accomplish something, they will stop making excuses to be elsewhere.

Man steps on an ant when he can't catch the fly.

I'm aware of how difficult it is to work and be a mom - I have an 11-year-old son - and I would love to help anyone else who is trying to get into the field.

For many phenomena, 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes.

Perhaps the only limits to the human mind are those we believe in.

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 [in the words of Leo Marx] 'the essential meaninglessness of all creations of the mind: words, images, and ideas.'

Being smart in the arts is the same as being smart in engineering is the same as being smart in writing is the same as being smart in anything, really. It's the ability to manipulate all the pieces of the puzzle in your mind, try to fit them together, and when they don't fit quite right... you sand the edges/corners and make them all fit.

We're worn into grooves by Time - by our habits. In the end, these grooves are going to show whether we've been second-rate or champions, each in his way, in dispatching the affairs of every day. By choosing our habits, we determine the grooves into which Time will wear us; and these are grooves that enrich our lives and make for ease of mind, peace, happiness - achievement.

I was born a human but this was an accident of fate…since childhood I’ve been captivated by the study of robots and cyborgs. Now I’m in a position where I can actually become one.

For every two degrees the temperature goes up, check-ins at ice cream shops go up by 2%.

Peel back the facade of rigorous methodology projects and ask why the project was successful, and the answer is people.

No economic, political or military power can compare with the power of a change of mind

Of the major incentives to improve safety, by far the most compelling is that of economics. The moral incentive, which is most evident following an accident, is more intense but is relatively short lived.

Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.

Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.

This cement can be used in any situation and for any purpose to which any other mortar or hydraulic cement can be applied. It does not become perfectly hard within one or two months.

Many contemporary painters feel that their landscapes come from within and are brought to the surface and given form as a result of various stimuli. The artist's internal world is waiting to be evoked by whatever means the artist finds most productive, and... this world is just as important as the outer, visible world.

Some fear flutter because they do not understand it. And some fear it because they do.

Mathematics is an experimental science, and definitions do not come first, but later on.

The closer you look at something, the more complex it seems to be.

Your body gets old but your mind can always accept that.

Columbus did not know where he was going, how far it was, nor where he had been after his return. With Apollo, there is no such lack of information. Nevertheless, the flight will involve risks of great magnitude and probably risks that have not been foreseen.

We need a break from Capitalism.

The words 'theory' and 'practice' are of Greek origin; they carry our thoughts back to the ancient philosophers by whom they were contrived, and by whom they were also contrasted and placed in opposition, as denoting two mutually conflicting and mutually inconsistent ideas. ... [this fallacy] based on a double system of natural laws retarded for centuries the development of physical science, notably mechanics.

Think about what a user is going to type.

SEO is not synonymous to JUNK E-MAIL.

Tungsten, X-rays, and Coolidge form a trinity that has left an indelible impression upon our life and times. The key word in this triad is Coolidge, for his work brought the element tungsten from laboratory obscurity to the central role of the industrial stage and gave the X-ray a central role in the progress of medicine throughout the world.

Basically, for any complex to be sustainable needs to have a balance between two factors: resilience and efficiency. These two factors can be calculated from the structure of the network that is involved in a complex system. A resilient, efficient system needs to be diverse and interconnected. On the other hand, diversity and interconnectivity decrease efficiency. Therefore, the key is an appropriate balance between efficiency and resilience.

Your grandchildren will likely find it incredible - or even sinful - that you burned up a gallon of gasoline to fetch a pack of cigarettes!

The Columbia accident made us realize that we had been playing Russian roulette with the shuttle crews - that we had been very, very fortunate in the past that the foam did not cause critical damage.

Spend your 'different points' wisely.

Theory is the essence of facts. Without theory scientific knowledge would be only worthy of the madhouse.

You can't control what you can't measure