Top 543 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Engineers - Page 7

The so-called ‘crank’ may be quite original in his ideas. … Invention, however, in the engineering sense involves originality; but not that alone, if the results are to be of value. There is imagination more or less fertile, but with it a knowledge of what has been done before, carried perhaps by the memory, together with a sense of the present or prospective needs in art or industry. Necessity is not always the mother of invention. It may be prevision.

If you don't like trading, gambling and betting, then you don't like living.

Thought is borne of failure.

But for the silly chaps, we would still be living in the Stone Age.

The amateur software engineer is always in search of magic.

The mathematicians are the priests of the modern world.

If anything can go wrong, it will.

A permanent and sustainable solution to all the problems facing working people is possible by taking the biggest companies into democratic ownership, and reorganizing the economy on a democratically planned basis. Under such a system we could democratically decide how to allocate resources. We could rapidly transition away from fossil fuels, develop massive jobs programs to rebuild the country's rotting infrastructure, and begin to build a whole new world based on meeting the needs of the majority, not the profits of a few.

The objective is not to "make your links appear natural"; the objective is that your links are natural.

Throughout history, the really fundamental changes in societies have come about not from the dictates of governments and the results of battles, but through vast numbers of people changing their minds, sometimes only a little bit.

The car is not a rabbit or a deer that jumps around in sweeping lines, but it is a man-made work of technology in need of an appropriate roadway. Rather, the car resembles a dragon fly or any other jumping animal that moves shorter distances in straight lines and then changes its direction at different points.

One principle problem of educating software engineers is that they will not use a new method until they believe it works and, more importantly, that they will not believe the method will work until they see it for themselves.

Software engineering economics.

The problem is we don't understand the problem.

The key to the utilization of atomic energy for world peace will be found in the will of all people to restrict its use for the betterment of mankind.

Knowledge of our duties is the most essential part of the philosophy of life. If you escape duty you avoid action. The world demands results.

Factories are the workplaces of our National Socialist racial comrades.

If a project has not achieved a system architecture, including its rationale, the project should not proceed to full-scale system development. Specifying the architecture as a deliverable enables its use throughout the development and maintenance process.

You must try to make the most of all that comes but also don't forget to learn a lot of all that goes.

Man, the cutting edge of terrestrial life, has no rational alternative but to expand the environmental and resource base beyond Earth.

A fool with a tool is still a fool.

Comprehensiveness is the enemy of comprehensibility.

When comparing human memory and computer memory it is clear that the human version has two distinct disadvantages. Firstly, as indeed I have experienced myself, due to ageing, human memory can exhibit very poor short term recall.

People always complain about The Grammys because they're not a pop contest, but they're not supposed to be a pop contest. They're about excellence.

The fundamental idea of these pylons, or great archways, is based on a method of construction peculiar to me, of which the principle consists in giving to the edges of the pyramid a curve of such a nature that this pyramid shall be capable of resisting the force of the wind without necessitating the junction of the edges by diagonals as is usually done.

The best result of mathematics is to be able to do without it.

I'm a bit of a connoisseur of Google criticism.

Design adds value faster than it adds cost.

Process is not a substitute for skill.

Truth is the one thing in nature always consistent with itself, and it is the one guide given to us in steering on the ocean of fate.

I have an artist background and I got into the field because I heard things in my own head that weren't happening and I wanted to have the control. So I learned to record and mix and do all those things. I found it as a means to an end, and I was fascinated by sound and creating sound. I very quickly became addicted to understanding everything there was to know.

Both science and art have to do with ordered complexity.

Making music is a wonderful way to spend your life, but do it for the love before a career. Enjoy it.

Now I'm a pretty lazy person and am prepared to work quite hard in order to avoid work.

I think imaginative exercises can have a profound impact on the future - what you can imagine can sometimes turn into something you can figure out how to build.

It is hard to write even the smallest piece of code correctly.

Get the right people. Then no matter what all else you might do wrong after that, the people will save you. That's what management is all about.

In any racing engine, the nearer you are to it disintegrating, the better it's performance will be

We're beginning the age in which machines attached to our bodies will make us stronger and more efficient.

Vanity is apt to inspire contempt, but that becomes immediately tempered by a gentler and more gracious feeling; for the vain man desires to win our approbation, and in this way he flatters us.

We're entering a bionic era where we actually are beginning to see technology that's sophisticated enough to emulate key physiological functions.

One of the most thoughtless statements, parroted ad nauseam ever since rational concern for our environment exploded into an emotional syndrome, calls Man the only animal that soils its own nest. Every animal soils its nest with the products of its metabolism if unable to move away. Space technology gives us for the first time the freedom to leave our nest, at least for certain functions, in order not to soil it.

The French flag is the only one to have a staff a thousand feet tall.

I don't like sitting at a keyboard.

First law of Bad Management: If something isn't working, do more of it.

The operating management, providing as it does for the care of near thirty thousand miles of railway, is far more important than that for construction in which there is comparatively little doing.

The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.

Money management is the only strategy to survive in this crazy, stupid and doped financial world market.

Man's mind and spirit grow with the space in which they are allowed to operate.

In thermodynamics as well as in other branches of molecular physics , the laws of phenomena have to a certain extent been anticipated, and their investigation facilitated, by the aid of hypotheses as to occult molecular structures and motions with which such phenomena are assumed to be connected. The hypothesis which has answered that purpose in the case of thermodynamics, is called that of "molecular vortices," or otherwise, the "centrifugal theory of elasticity.

Multiple Inheritance is like a parachute. You don't often need it, but when you do, you really need it.

Tell him to go to hell.

The dollar is the final term in almost every equation which arises in the practice of engineering in any or all of its branches, except qualifiedly as to military and naval engineering, where in some cases cost may be ignored.

Both pure and applied science have gradually pushed further and further the requirements for accuracy and precision. However, applied science, particularly in the mass production of interchangeable parts, is even more exacting than pure science in certain matters of accuracy and precision.

I need not add that freedom is a dangerous thing. But it is hardly possible that we are all cowards.

I am going to design, in a great hurry, and I believe to build a station after my own fancy; that is, with engineering roofs, etc. etc. It is at Paddington, in cutting, and admitting of no exterior, all interior and all roofed in.

One thing that's really pulled me in to helping artists create their album is that I get to help them tell a story. It's about the way you frame that story and finding the best way to tell that story.

Take the best that exists and make it better.

If it is love that makes the world go round, it is self-induction that makes electromagnetic waves go round the world.

The two [separate] UIs are both incredibly simple and don't even look like computer programs; they barely need menus. [When combined, they] suddenly look like software.