Top 543 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Engineers - Page 9

[C]ensorship in any form is the opening wedge for fascism, since it places arbitrary and unwarranted power in the hands of individuals.

The Engineer is one who, in the world of physics and applied sciences, begets new things, or adapts old things to new and better uses; above all, one who, in that field, attains new results in the best way and at lowest cost.

That is very fine; but it is impossible to make the men perfect; the men will always remain the same as they are now; and no legislation will make a man have more presence of mind, or, I believe, make him more cautious; and besides that, the next time such an accident occurs, the circumstances will be so different, that the instructions given to the men, in consequence of the former accident, will not apply.

Unplanned process improvement is wishful thinking.

Poor management can increase software costs more rapidly than any other factor.

Don't judge your success by other peoples opinions. Have self belief.

If we do not like what we see in that mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix society.

America is now a space-faring nation. a frontier good for millions of years. The only time remotely comparable was when Columbus discovered a whole new world.

There can be no absolute reality, there can be no absolute truth.

The gift of willingness is the only thing that stands between the quiet desperation of a disingenuous life and the actualization of unexpressed potential.

I was born human. But this was an accident of fate - a condition merely of time and place. I believe it's something we have the power to change.

I'd like to know what the Internet is going to look like in 2050. Thinking about it makes me wish I were eight years old.

The transitional concept of management is reaching the end of the road.

If you find that your organization can't make the hard decisions that Scrum demands, then high-risk, uncertain projects have very little probability of success in your organization.

On the basis of capitalism, victories like raising the minimum wage are only temporary.

All of life is iterative. It goes back to the point I made earlier, which is you can't a priori know enough to even ask the right questions.

No one else can tell you what your life's work is, but it's important that you find it. There is a part of you that knows - affirm that part.

The tendency to superstitions should be counteracted from the earliest age; or rather steps should be taken to protect the mind of the child from superstitions imposed upon it by ignorant nurses or silly mothers.

There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. [...] The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It's harder to read code than to write it.

Reengineering posits a radical new principle: that the design of work must be based not on hierarchical management and the specialization of labor but on end-to-end processes and the creation of value for the customer.

I want to do something with my life; I want to be a cyborg.

(Walls) show that politicians have reached the end of their ideas about what to do about a difficult situation with a neighbor. ... They can't think what else to do.

We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites. As always, we’ll keep our ears open for feedback on ways to iterate and improve our ranking algorithms toward that goal.

Because of the interconnectedness of all minds, affirming a positive vision may be about the most sophisticated action any one of us can take.

I like to be in the laboratory with the doors closed. I like experimenting and trying things.

We're short on wisdom; we're high on technology. Where's it going to lead?

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

Every aquarium will eventually leak.

Ah, bien je prétends que les courbes des quatre areêtes du monument, telles que le calcul les a fournies, donneront une grand impression de force et de beauté. Well, I think the curves of the four pillars of the monument, as the calculations have provided them, give it a great sense of force and beauty.

We weren’t trying to strike it rich with Firefox. It’s open source and it’s free. We weren’t trying to take over the world; we had kind of modest goals, and it was OK if it failed. We were a lot freer to make risky decisions. If you can afford to do things that way, it’s just so much better. You’re not thinking about venture capitalists or marketing or sales. Just product and users, all day every day.

If you love music and you are good in it, you will be fine. But be prepared to have to work hard.

It is better to be un-informed than ill-informed.

If an artist wants to work with me because they feel I've made some credible albums and there've been things that are long-lasting, it's because those artists took the time and we built an idea.

Every sentence in order to have definite scientific meaning must be practically or at least theoretically verifiable as either true or false upon the basis of experimental measurements either practically or theoretically obtainable by carrying out a definite and previously specified operation in the future. The meaning of such a sentence is the method of its verification.

The poetic beauty of Davy's mind never seems to have left him. To that circumstance I would ascribe the distinguishing feature in his character, and in his discoveries,-a vivid imagination sketching out new tracts in regions unexplored, for the judgement to select those leading to the recesses of abstract truth.

When I make my own music, there is no external producer. I just do everything as quickly as possible. I try not to overthink things.

The disadvantage of working over networks is that you can't so easily go into someone else's office and rip their bloody heart out.

It's not that appealing when something sexist happens to you. But if you're strong enough, and you can push that aside and keep your goal in mind and remember that you're doing your job - whatever that is, whether it's a producer or an artist or a mastering engineer - because you love it, then all that stuff falls by the wayside.

When to use iterative development? You should use iterative development only on projects that you want to succeed.

I think I'm better at producing than I am at being a songwriter, but it doesn't change the fact that I still have a desire to play and write songs. I've never wanted to be a career musician. But I still love to play and write. It's a big part of who I am. Songwriting is not particularly easy for me. I think it would be easy for me if I didn't have such high restrictions and feelings about what I want my music to be. I'm not precious at all when it comes to producing music and I can bring that to an artist and let them expand their horizons.

Strive for perfection in everything you do.

The first thing you'll have to do, is the last thing you wished.

Nothing brings fear to my heart more than a floating point number.

The way to the stars is open.

In engineering, as in other creative arts, we must learn to do analysis to support our efforts in synthesis. One cannot build a beautiful and functional bridge without a knowledge of steel and dirt, and a considerable mathematical technique for using this knowledge to compute the properties of structures. Similarly, one cannot build a beautiful computer system without a deep understanding of how to "previsualize" the process generated by the code one writes.

Intuition is the soul within the soul.

Today, the rich are the haves and the poor are the have-nots. Tomorrow, the rich will be the have-food and the poor will be the have-not food.

Simple rules guide innovative, intelligent responses. Comprehensive rules guide rote, routine responses.

The German landscape is something unique that we cannot disturb and have no right to destroy. The more densely populated our 'living space' becomes with settlements, the greater our hunger will grow for unspoilt nature. The ever increasing spiritual damage caused by life within the big city will make this hunger practically uncontrollable... when we build here on this the landscape of our homeland we must be clear that we will protect its beauty; and in places where this beauty has already disappeared, we will reconstruct it.

My first operating system project was to build a real-time system called RSX-11M that ran on Digital's PDP-11 16-bit series of minicomputers. ... a multitasking operating system that would run in 32 KB of memory with a hierarchical file system, application swapping, real-time scheduling, and a set of development utilities. The operating system and utilities were to run on the entire line of PDP-11 platforms, from the very small systems up through the PDP-11/70 which had memory-mapping hardware and supported up to 4 MB of memory.

You can manage what you do not understand; but you cannot lead it.

The quickest way to experiencing the peace inside, is to learn to recognize when I am not at peace.

One other specific piece of guidance we've offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.

Nothing works better than just improving your product.

No one can lead our lives for us. We are responsible for our actions. So people-especially the younger generation--need to be very careful especially where safe sex is concerned.

Not only are Puerto Ricans citizens by birth, but one would be hard-pressed to find a Puerto Rican without a sister in New York or a son in Chicago, a cousin in Orlando or a daughter in Honolulu or Oklahoma City.

This third day of October, 1942, is the first of a new era in transportation, that of space travel

The Japanese don't write in alphabetic writing; they write in pictographs. So they never became visual, they stayed in the oral world, which is, everything is part of reality. Which means that they can accept any new technology? - ?it's not threatening to them, and they can still continue to maintain their traditional culture, even in the face of high technology.

The greatest problem before engineers and managers today is the economical utilization of labor . The limiting of output by the workman, and the limiting by the employer of the amount a workman is allowed to earn, are both factors which militate against that harmonious co-operation of employer and employee which is essential to their highest common good.

Find something you enjoy and love and you're passionate about. And then dedicate all you've got to make it a success. And if you have those two things, I think with your passion and dedication, there is nothing that you cannot accomplish.