Famous Quotes & Sayings

Igor Sikorsky

At that time [1909] the chief engineer was almost always the chief test pilot as well. That had the fortunate result of eliminating poor engineering early in aviation.

Freeman Dyson

Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people.

Fred Brooks

The first step toward the management of disease was replacement of demon theories and humours theories by the germ theory. That very step, the beginning of hope, in itself dashed all hopes of magical solutions. It told workers that progress would be made stepwise, at great effort, and that a persistent, unremitting care would have to be paid to a discipline of cleanliness. So it is with software engineering today.

Francis Crick

You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.

Ernest Rutherford

The more physics you have the less engineering you need.

H. G. Wells

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.

James Dyson

Manufacturing is more than just putting parts together. It's coming up with ideas, testing principles and perfecting the engineering, as well as final assembly.

James Dyson

Engineering is treated with disdain, on the whole. It's considered to be rather boring and irrelevant, yet neither of those is true.

James Dyson

Hire inexperience. This year we plan to hire 200 engineers - half of whom are recent grads. Young people are not burdened by years of experience. They haven't learned - or been told - what is right or wrong. With engineering, there is no tried and tested path. You try, and fail, and fix, and fail again.

James Dyson

[M]anufacturing, science and engineering are ... incredibly creative. I'd venture to say more so than creative advertising agencies and things that are known as the creative industries.

James Dyson

Britain's great strength is its innovative, design and engineering natural ability and we're not using it.

James Dyson

Engineering undergraduates should not be charged fees. They should receive grants, not student loans, and the government will get the money back long-term from increased exports.

Jakob Nielsen

Inadequate use of usability engineering methods in software development projects have been estimated to cost the US economy about $30 billion per year in lost productivity.

Isaac Asimov

Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world.

Isaac Asimov

The advance of genetic engineering makes it quite conceivable that we will begin to design our own evolutionary progress.

Neal Shusterman

He only wishes there were something that would heal the scars in his mind, which he can still feel. He sees his mind now as an archipelago of islands that he labors to build bridges between - and while he's had great success engineering the most spectacular of bridges, he suspects there are some islands that he'll never reach.

Henry Petroski

What is commonly overlooked in using the computer is the fact that the central goal of design is still to obviate failure, and thus it is critical to identify exactly how a structure may fail. The computer cannot do this by itself . . .

Henry Petroski

I emphasize that virtually every engineering calculation is ultimately a failure calculation, because without a failure criterion against which to measure the calculated result, it is a meaningless number.

Henry Petroski

Failure is Central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation.

Henry Petroski

A failed structure provides a counterexample to a hypothesis and shows us incontrovertibly what cannot be done, while a structure that stands without incident often conceals whatever lessons or caveats it might hold for the next generation of engineers.

Henry Petroski

Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure.

Henry Petroski

Engineering, like poetry, is an attempt to approach perfection. And engineers, like poets, are seldom completely satisfied with their creations. They notice, even if no one else does, the world that is not quite le mot juste, or the hairline crack that blemishes the structure.

Hilaire Belloc

It seems to be saying perpetually; 'I am the end of the nineteenth century; I am glad they built me of iron; let me rust.' ... It is like a passing fool in a crowd of the University, a buffoon in the hall; for all the things in Paris has made, it alone has neither wits nor soul.

Norman Ralph Augustine

For every scientific (or engineering) action, there is an equal and opposite social reaction.

Michio Kaku

What we usually consider as impossible are simply engineering problems... there's no law of physics preventing them.

Michio Kaku

Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem.

James Lovelock

I suspect any worries about genetic engineering may be unnecessary. Genetic mutations have always happened naturally, anyway.

John Doerr

I would staple a green card to the diploma of anyone that graduates with a degree in the physical sciences or engineering in the U.S.

John Dykstra

You had to make a camera look like it's traveling at 300 mph, but you couldn't make it actually travel at 300 mph so you had to slow everything down and build devices to do that. So you were constantly engineering.

John Dykstra

I like engineering, but I love the creative input.

Lois McMaster Bujold

It's an ancient and honorable term for the final step in any engineering project. Turn it on, see if it smokes.

Jules Verne

I have always made a point in my romances of basing my so-called inventions upon a groundwork of actual fact, and of using in their construction methods and materials which are not entirely without the pale of contemporary engineering skill and knowledge.

Jeremy Rifkin

The public should know that the liability issues here have yet to be resolved, or even raised. If you're a farmer and you're growing a genetically engineering food crop, those genes are going to flow to the other farm.