Famous Quotes & Sayings

Nina Fedoroff

One of the really remarkably beneficial aspects of genetic engineering is that much of the previous methodology for controlling pests and so forth is through chemicals that affect a very broad spectrum of insects, for example, or fungicides that control fungi.

Dave Grohl

When you're young, you're not afraid of what comes next. You're excited by it.

David Whyte

For the personality, bankruptcy or failure may be a disaster. For the soul, it may be grist for its strangely joyful mill, and a condition it has been secretly engineering for years.

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.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

To strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering -- that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead.

Elon Musk

Engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the world.

Steven Pinker

Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.

Steven Pinker

Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem!

Richard Hamming

Put glibly: In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it. In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it. Of course, you seldom, if ever, see either pure state.

Richard Hamming

Science is concerned with what is possible while engineering is concerned with choosing, from among the many possible ways, one that meets a number of often poorly stated economic and practical objectives.

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.

Niklaus Wirth

Indeed, the woes of Software Engineering are not due to lack of tools, or proper management, but largely due to lack of sufficient technical competence.

Niklaus Wirth

Good engineering is characterized by gradual, stepwise refinement of products that yields increased performance under given constraints and with given resources.

James Grant

Progress is cumulative in science and engineering, but cyclical in finance.

Norman Ralph Augustine

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

Eric Hoffer

The most troublesome problem which confronts social engineering is how to provide for the untalented and, what is equally important, how to provide against them.

Simon Newcomb

All attempts at artificial aviation are not only dangerous to human life, but foredoomed to failure from the engineering standpoint.

Jacque Fresco

Very few people can communicate with one another. The only language that's not subject to interpretation is mathematics, chemistry, basic science, engineering principles, and applied agriculture. But other than that, many systems today are subject to interpretation.

Marc Garneau

I wanted to further my education, so I went on to get a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and came back and served about ten years in the Canadian Navy as what we call a combat systems engineer.

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.

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.

Ray Kurzweil

Those with engineering skills will build tomorrow's genius computers. But those with the ability to create knowledge of any kind will be the ones who are best able to extract great value from them. The way to create value in the age of genius machines will be to compile and disseminate knowledge that other people will find useful.

Richard P. Feynman

In fact, the science of thermodynamics began with an analysis, by the great engineer Sadi Carnot, of the problem of how to build the best and most efficient engine, and this constitutes one of the few famous cases in which engineering has contributed to fundamental physical theory. Another example that comes to mind is the more recent analysis of information theory by Claude Shannon. These two analyses, incidentally, turn out to be closely related.