Quotes about engineer
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“In forming your plan for your future you need to distinguish three different questions: What is possible? What is likely to happen? What is desirable to have happen? In a sense the first is Science… The second is Engineering.. The third is ethics, morals, or… value judgements. …you will probably have an idea of how to alter things to make the more desirable future occur …having a vision is what tends to separate the leaders from the followers.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)

Idea, Question, Sense, Science

“Mackieson gave me the other day a buffalo hide whip from Africa called in those regions a Peace Maker and used as such in the households of chieftains. Our Peace Makers are our Armstrongs and Whitworths and our engineers.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Letter to Austen Henry Layard (23 October 1864), quoted in Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London: Constable, 1970), p. 590.
1860s

Peace

“The Pre represents only a first shot. Rubinstein and his engineers are already preparing a family of devices that will run on the Palm Web OS. Could it be that Apple has staked out an early lead with a breakthrough product only to be passed by others? It's happened before.”

Daniel Lyons (1960) American writer

The Palm Pre Takes on Apple's iPhone http://www.newsweek.com/id/178536 in Newsweek (7 January 2009)

Family

“I bring out an engineer, everything fits into a suitcase and we just record. I have so much spare time during that day that it makes sense to utilize it to do something creative like that, as opposed to just sitting around the hotel and sightseeing or something.”

Bryan Adams (1959) Canadian singer-songwriter

Adams tells Billboard.com that he recorded the new songs for "Room Service" in hotel rooms and other locales while on the road. Billboard.com http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003787034 (April 08, 2008). Url accessed on December 15, 2008

Sense, Time

“You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes.”

Theo de Raadt (1968) systems software engineer

on the statement "Virtualization seems to have a lot of security benefits"
[Re: About Xen: maybe a reiterative question but .., MARC, openbsd-misc (Mailing list), https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119318909016582, 2007-10-23, 2017-10-31]

Stupidity, Thinking

“The development of the Watt governor for steam engines, which adapted the power output of the engine automatically to the load by means of feedback, consolidated the first Industrial Revolution.”

Anthony Stafford Beer (1926–2002) British theorist, consultant, and professor

Source: Management Science (1968), Chapter 6, The Viable Governor, p. 142.

“Perhaps the best reason to consider the hard sciences is that, well, one study suggests science, engineering, medicine, and dentistry graduates live longer than arts graduates (or law grads). So whatever money you make you can keep a bit longer.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 18.

Money, Law, Art, Study

“One of the most powerful engines of development and prosperity is trade and investment, which create new opportunities for entrepreneurs, and help people rise out of poverty, and reinforce fundamental values like transparency and rule of law. For all these reasons, many in these chambers have conducted free trade agreements at bilateral and regional levels. The most effective step of all would be an agreement that tears down trade barriers at the global level. The recent impasse in the Doha round is disappointing, but that does not have to be the final word. I urge every nation to seize this opportunity to lift up economies around the world and reach a successful Doha agreement as soon as possible. Beyond Doha, our nations must renew our commitment to open economies, and stand firm against economic isolationism. These objectives are being tested by turbulence in the global financial markets. Our economies are more closely connected than ever before, and I know that many of you here are watching how the United States government will address the problems in our financial system.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2008, Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 2008)

People, World, Law, Disappointment

“I want to tell you how I got to be a statistician. I was, of course, born in England and in 1939… when war broke out in September of that year, although I was close to getting a degree in Chemistry, I abandoned that and joined the Army. They put me in the Engineers (and when I see a bridge I still catch myself calculating where I would put the charges to blow it up).
Before I could actually do any of that I was moved to a highly secret experimental station in the south of England. At the time they were bombing London every night and our job was to help to find out what to do if, one night, they used poisonous gas.
Some of England's best scientists were there. There were a lot of experiments with small animals, I was a lab assistant making biochemical determinations, my boss was a professor of physiology dressed up as a colonel, and I was dressed up as a staff sergeant.
The results I was getting were very variable and I told my colonel that what we really needed was a statistician.
He said "we can't get one, what do you know about it?"”

George E. P. Box (1919–2013) British statistician

I said "Nothing, I once tried to read a book about it by someone called R. A. Fisher but I didn't understand it". He said "You've read the book so you better do it", so I said, "Yes sir"
An Accidental Statistician, 2010

War, Secret, Books, Understanding

“I am like a Rolls Royce which can run without an engine, just on reputation.”

Shahrukh Khan (1965) Indian actor, producer and television personality

From interview with Malavika Sangghvi

“The political history of the 20th century is the history of social-engineering projects executed by well-intentioned people that began well and ended badly. There were big errors like communism, but also lesser ones, like a Vietnam War designed by the best and the brightest, urban renewal efforts that decimated neighborhoods, welfare policies that had the unintended effect of weakening families and development programs that left a string of white elephant projects across the world.These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell. These writers — some left, some right — had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.”

David Brooks (1961) American journalist, commentator and editor

[David, Brooks, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/opinion/24brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion, The Big Test, New York Times, February 23, 2009, February 24, 2009]
2000s

War, People, School, Family

“Savery, Newcomen, Smeaton, the famous Watt, Woolf, Trevithick, and some other English engineers, are the veritable creators of the steam-engine.”

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) French physicist, the "father of thermodynamics" (1796–1832)

p, 125
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)

“Only when I began studying chemical engineering at Oregon Agricultural College did I realize that I myself might discover something new about the nature of the world.”

Linus Pauling (1901–1994) American scientist

Linus Pauling In His Own Words (1995) by Barbara Marinacci.
1990s

World, Nature, Study

“In the summer camp mentality of American universities, the ferocity of genuine intellectual debate would just seem like spoiling everyone’s fun. Ambitious humanities professors go about the business behind a brick wall of “theory,” which they imagine is the dernier cri, but which has long been out of fashion, even in Paris. Drab, uncultivated philistines, without broad knowledge of the arts, have seized the top jobs in the Ivy League, simply because they have the right opinions and know the right people. In the past twenty years, conferences became the infernal engine driving the academic profession. The conference crowd, an international party circuit of literary luminaries ever on the move, was put together by the new humanities centers. These programs had the initially laudable aim of fostering interdisciplinary exchanges outside the repressive framework of the conservative, static and over-tenured university departments. But the epidemic of French theory was abroad in the world. The humanities centers quickly became careerist stockyards, where greedy speculation and insider trading were as much the rules of the game as on Wall Street.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), p. 101

People, World, Art, Imagination

“The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

Biophilia (1984)

Life, Search, Sense, Time

“It is impossible to over-emphasize the importance of al-Jazari's work in the history of engineering. Until modern times there is no other document from any cultural area that provides a comparable wealth of instructions for the design, manufacture and assembly of machines… Al-Jazari did not only assimilate the techniques of his non-Arab and Arab predecessors, he was also creative. He added several mechanical and hydraulic devices. The impact of these inventions can be seen in the later designing of steam engines and internal combustion engines, paving the way for automatic control and other modern machinery. The impact of al-Jazari's inventions is still felt in modern contemporary mechanical engineering [2].”

Donald Hill (1922–1994) British historian and engineer

Donald Hill, Studies in Medieval Islamic Technology,; as cited in: Salim Al-Hassani. " 800 Years Later: In Memory of Al-Jazari, A Genius Mechanical Engineer http://muslimheritage.com/article/800-years-later-memory-al-jazari-genius-mechanical-engineer," at muslimheritage.com, 2015.

Way, History, Time, Wealth

“It's not that I'm not social. I'm social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you're purveying. It improves nothing. It's not nourishing. It's like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You're not hungry, you don't need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you're pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it's equally addictive.”

Dave Eggers book The Circle

Mercer, to Mae; p. 134
The Circle (2013)

Food, Guy

“The difference between "machines" and "engines" is obviously this, that machines need more workmen and greater power to make them take effect, as for instance ballistae and the beams of presses. Engines, on the other hand, accomplish their purpose at the intelligent touch of a single workman,…”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book X, Chapter I, Sec. 3

Intelligence

“In the fall, acorns, filberts, and hickory nuts are gathered by wildlife as winter stores. Field and pack rats bring in smaller seed such as wild rice from the marshes. If storages are provided, these foragers will fill hollow pipes or logs, or smaller pipes, old vehicle engine manifolds, and nest boxes or wall cavities. Seed so collected is sound, clean, and neatly stored. Providing some 15% is left, and given over to winter food for these workers, 85% can be collected for human use. A few people regularly collect their hickory nuts or wild rice in this way, by providing dens for squirrels or pack rats. It is a question of cooperation and provision for others, instead of attempting to kill off the experts and do the job yourself.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 12.15

People, Food, Way, Question

“Rust rust rust
in the engines of love and time”

Leonard Cohen book Flowers for Hitler

"Front Lawn", Flowers for Hitler (1964)

Love, Time

“Net neutrality would require that every search engine produce an equal number of results that satisfy every disagreement about [every] issue… Just think of it as Fairness Doctrine for the Internet. I'm not making this up.”

Rush Limbaugh (1951) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, author, and television personality

On net neutrality, The Rush Limbaugh Show, March 16, 2010 http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_031610/content/01125111.guest.html

Search, Thinking

“The first machine of Papin was very similar to the gunpowder-engine… of Huyghens. In place of gunpowder, a small quantity of water is placed at the bottom of the cylinder, A; a fire is built beneath it, "the bottom being made of very thin metal," and the steam formed soon raises the piston, B, to the top where a latch, E, engaging a notch in latch engaging the piston rod, H, holds it up until it is desired that it shall drop. The fire being removed, the steam condenses, and a vacuum is formed below the piston, and the latch, E, being disengaged, the piston is driven down by the superincumbent atmosphere and raises the weight which has been, meantime, attached to a rope… passing from the piston rod over pulleys… The machine had a cylinder two and a half inches in diameter, and raised 60 pounds once a minute; and Papin calculated that a machine of a little more than two feet diameter of cylinder and of four feet stroke would raise 8,000 pounds four feet per minute—i. e., that it would yield about one horse-power.”

Robert Henry Thurston (1839–1903) mechanical engineer

Robert Henry Thurston, A History of the Growth of the Steam-engine https://books.google.com/books?id=VDgOAAAAYAAJ (1878) Parts 1-2, pp. 50-51

Water, Horse

“There are several world view assumptions present in enterprise engineering. The first assumption is that the enterprise can be viewed as a complex system. This is necessary because systems in organizations are systems of organized complexity. Complexity is the result of the multiplicity and intricacy of man’s interaction with other components of the system. Secondly, the enterprise is to be viewed as a system of processes. These processes are engineered both individually and holistically. The final assumption is the use of engineering rigor in transforming the enterprise. The enterprise engineering paradigm views the enterprise as a complex system of processes that can be engineered to accomplish specific organizational objectives. In the Enterprise Engineering paradigm, the enterprise is viewed as a complex system of processes that can be engineered to accomplish specific organizational objectives.”

Donald H. Liles (1947) American engineer

Source: Enterprise modeling within an enterprise engineering framework (1996), p. 993

World

“The key to artificial intelligence has always been the representation. You and I are streaming data engines.”

Jeff Hawkins (1957) American entrepreneur and neuroscientist; founder of Palm Computing

The New York Times: Jeff Hawkins Develops a Brainy Big Data Company https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/28/jeff-hawkins-develops-a-brainy-big-data-company/ (28 November 2012)

Intelligence

“Enterprise engineering is rooted in both the organizational sciences and the information system sciences. In our current understanding, three concepts are paramount to the theoretical and practical pursuit of enterprise engineering: enterprise ontology, enterprise architecture, and enterprise governance.”

Erik Proper (1967) Dutch computer scientist

Preface
Advances in Enterprise Engineering II (2009)

Understanding, Science

“The realities of globalization can be seen in something as simple as the investigation of a car crash. If a patrolman investigated a fatal accident in the 1970s, the victims and the witnesses were both likely from the local community; and if the officer climbed into the wreckage, to look for some malfunction in the vehicle, he would probably see from the serial numbers that the car was made in the U. S. He could put all that together, and make his case. But Consider the death of Princess Diana. This accident involved an English citizen, with an Egyptian boyfriend, crashed in a French tunnel, driving a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian, who was drunk on Scotch whiskey, followed closely by Italian paparazzi, on Japanese motorcycles, and finally treated with Brazilian medicines by an American doctor. In this case, even leaving aside the fame of the victims, a mere neighborhood canvass would hardly have completed the forensic picture, as it might have a generation before.”

Mark Riebling (1963) American writer

The New Paradigm: Merging Law Enforcement and Intelligence Strategies (2006)

Death, Cars, Communication, Reality

“Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence. The engine of consolidation will be the Federal judiciary; the two other branches the corrupting and corrupted instruments.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter, Thomas Jefferson to Nathaniel Macon, 1821: ME 15-341, as quoted in The Assault on Reason, Al Gore, A&C Black (2012, reprint), p. 87 : ISBN 1408835800, 9781408835807, and Federal Jurisdiction, Form #05.018, Sovereignty Education and Defense Ministry (2012)
1820s

Country

“It is imperfection — not perfection — that is the end result of the program written into that formidably complex engine that is the human brain, and of the influences exerted upon us by the environment and whoever takes care of us during the long years of our physical, psychological and intellectual development.”

Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909–2012) Italian neurologist

Quoted in New York Times obituary http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/science/dr-rita-levi-montalcini-a-revolutionary-in-the-study-of-the-brain-dies-at-103.html?_r=0

Perfection

“Much of the skill of the true mathematical physicist and of the mathematical astronomer consists in the power of adapting methods and results carried out on an exact mathematical basis to obtain approximations sufficient for the purposes of physical measurements. It might perhaps be thought that a scheme of Mathematics on a frankly approximative basis would be sufficient for all the practical purposes of application in Physics, Engineering Science, and Astronomy, and no doubt it would be possible to develop, to some extent at least, a species of Mathematics on these lines. Such a system would, however, involve an intolerable awkwardness and prolixity in the statements of results, especially in view of the fact that the degree of approximation necessary for various purposes is very different, and thus that unassigned grades of approximation would have to be provided for. Moreover, the mathematician working on these lines would be cut off from the chief sources of inspiration, the ideals of exactitude and logical rigour, as well as from one of his most indispensable guides to discovery, symmetry, and permanence of mathematical form. The history of the actual movements of mathematical thought through the centuries shows that these ideals are the very life-blood of the science, and warrants the conclusion that a constant striving toward their attainment is an absolutely essential condition of vigorous growth. These ideals have their roots in irresistible impulses and deep-seated needs of the human mind, manifested in its efforts to introduce intelligibility in certain great domains of the world of thought.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A (1910), pp. 285-286; Cited in: Moritz (1914, 229): Mathematics and Science.

Life, World, History, Intelligence

“I only just hint this to show what use this engine may be put to in working of mills, especially where coals are cheap. I have only this to urge, that water in its fall from any determinate height, has simply a force answerable and equal to the force that raises it.”

Thomas Savery (1650–1715) British steam engineer

Thomas Savery, pp. 25-26 https://books.google.com/books?id=v_-yJ5c5a98C The Miner's Friend; or, An Engine to Raise Water by Fire, 1702

Water

“The civil engineer is the real 19th century architect.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

William Burges in: The Ecclesiologist, Vol. 28, 1867, p. 156: Cited in Crook (2004)

“The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Pt. 1
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

“A number of engineers became so-called disciples of Frederick W. Taylor, even though he had passed on to his reward in 1915. A considerable number of engineers took up the so-called scientific management of Frederick Taylor and further embroidered it and publicized themselves as efficiency engineers and management consultants. Henry L. Gantt had been Taylor's assistant at the Midvale Steel and the Bethlehem Steel Company. Gant, were among the many prominent advocates of Taylor's efficiency system with some variations.
Gant, Barth and others tried to start an organization, ' 'The New Machine." ' 'The New Machine" never got off the ground; all of them wrote articles and delivered papers in the engineering societies and management conferences. But their chief purpose was in creating a national image so they could sell their services to large-scale private enterprise as scientific managers and efficiency engineers who would be able to install the system that could extract more productivity from the American worker.”

Howard Scott (1890–1970) American engineer

Source: History and Purpose of Technocracy, 1965, p. 7

“He was perfect except for the fact that he was an engineer
And mothers prefer doctors
And lawyers Yet despite this imperfection
He was clean-looking and respectable-looking
And you'll never find a mother
Who doesn't appreciate a natural man”

Regina Spektor (1980) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Love Affair
11:11 (2001)

Nature, Perfection

“Sanctimonious slogans have a way of lulling well-meaning people, and at the same time providing self-seekers with means to frustrate the very controls that are most needed. Take, for example, a report entitled, “The Engineer’s Responsibility in Environmental Pollution Control,” submitted in 1971 to the government’s Council of Environmental Quality by the National Industrial Pollution Control Council. The report is an amorphous collection of noble generalities. It conjures up a vision of a crusading army of engineers, thousands abreast, marching in unison. The banner of this army is “cooperation.” Its mission is to “coordinate,” “unify,” “interact,” “centralize efforts,” and “pool resources.” Its weapons are “shared objectives,” “common goals,” “interdisciplinary concepts and techniques.” The cloud of pieties serves, not to enlighten, but to obscure the real truth, which is that environmental pollution control can never be achieved by the worthy sentiments of industr8ial spokesmen, but only by government regulation.”

Samuel C. Florman (1925) American writer and civil engineer

Source: The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (1976), p. 27

People, Truth, Way, Effort

“[In the year 1957] I have just returned from an exciting meeting of the American Society for Engineering Education where I heard a paper on the new discipline of systems engineering. It is no longer sufficient for engineers merely to design boxes such as computers with the expectation that they would become components of larger, more complex systems. That is wasteful because frequently the box component is a bad fit in the system and has to be redesigned or worse, can lead to system failure. We must learn how to design large-scale, complex systems from the top down so that the specification for each component is derivable from the requirements for the overall system. We must also take a much larger view of systems. We must design the man-machine interfaces and even the system-society interfaces. Systems engineers must be trained for the design of large-scale, complex, man-machine-social systems.”

A. Wayne Wymore (1927–2011) American mathematician

Systems Movement: Autobiographical Retrospectives (2004)

Education, Failure, Learning, Training

“Information Engineering is the application of an interlocking set of formal techniques for the planning, analysis, design, and construction of information systems on the enterprise wide basis or across a major sector of the enterprise.”

James Martin (author) (1933–2013) British information technology consultant and writer

Source: Information Engineering (1989), p. 1; cited in Karl E. Kurbel (2008) The making of information systems [electronic resource]. p. 176

“Use cases, scenarios or scripts are roughly synonymous terms for important ways to focus our design activities. I prefer the term use case (although quickly saying it three times can leave your tongue tied) because it emphasizes usage. A use case is a textual description of a sequence of interactions between an actor (roughly corresponding to an external agent or class of users) and the system we are designing. Use cases were first described by Ivar Jacobson in his book “Object Oriented Software Engineering A Use Case Driven Approach.”
Use cases have been around in various forms for quite some time. Jacobson, however, made the keen observation that use cases can be treated as refineable, extensible and even reusable specifications of system requirements. We’ve had these same goals for object designs. We know that it is harder to actually accomplish them than it is to talk about them.”

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (1953) American software engineer

About What is a Use Case?
Designing scenarios: Making the case for a use case framework (1993)

Books, Way, Time

“The engine of the Panzer is a weapon just as the main-gun.”

Heinz Guderian (1888–1954) German general

Der Motor des Panzers ist ebenso seine Waffe wie die Kanone.
As quoted in Die Deutschen gepanzerten Truppen bis 1945 (1965) by Oskar Munzel, p. 159

“States as great engines move slowly.”

Francis Bacon book The Advancement of Learning

Book II
The Advancement of Learning (1605)

“To Monsieur Eiffel the Engineer, the brave builder of so gigantic and original a specimen of modern Engineering from one who has the greatest respect and admiration for all Engineers including the Great Engineer the Bon Dieu.”

Thomas Edison (1847–1931) American inventor and businessman

When Thomas Edison visited the Eiffel Tower during the 1889 World's Fair, he signed the guestbook with this message, as quoted in The Tallest Tower by Joseph Harris, p. 95.
1800s

“Much of the early engineering development of digital computers was done in universities. A few years ago, the view was commonly expressed that universities had played their part in computer design, and that the matter could now safely be left to industry. […] Apart from the obvious functions of keeping in the public domain material that might otherwise be hidden, universities can make a special contribution by reason of their freedom from commercial considerations, including freedom from the need to follow the fashion.”

Maurice Wilkes (1913–2010) British computer scientist

Sect. 1: Pioneering Days
"Computers Then and Now" (1968)

Fashion, Freedom, Universe, Parting

“Japan has a lot of engineers who work at desks. When it comes to implementation, though, they lose confidence and haven't got the courage of their convictions when other people criticize them. Engineers like that can't build cars. Success in this industry demands engineers who have the courage and the decisiveness to implement ideas.”

Kiichiro Toyoda (1894–1952) Japanese businessman

Kiichiro Toyoda in the 1940s, cited in: Satoshi Hino (2005). Inside the Mind of Toyota: Management Principles for Enduring Growth. p. 93

People, Cars, Confidence, Idea

“• Special Provision on the Provision and Maintenance of Basic Educational Facilities was amended to reflect changes in the distribution of the appropriations and the inclusion of an amount for the annual payment of school buildings constructed by the NHA. Likewise, the said provision also allows the DepEd to deduct a 0.5% engineering and administrative overhead (EAO) on the project cost.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget

Education, School, Change

“Time is only linear for engineers and referees.”

Craig Ferguson book Between the Bridge and the River

Between the Bridge and the River (2006)

Time

“It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 75

Pain, Thinking

“Do women avoid fields like engineering because of the tendency of male-dominated fields to discriminate against women? Probably not. Prior to the women's movement, engineering was no more male-dominated than medicine and law. And women have entered medicine and law by the droves. When women enter male-dominated fields, they tend to enter the more glamorous occupations. And the media reinforces this. There was L. A. Law, but no L. A. Engineering. ER doesn't mean Engineering Room. Women receive six layers of encouragement to enter fields involving engineering, computers, and math and science: first, better starting salaries than men's; second, special programs for girls in high school; third, female-only government scholarships; fourth, female-only corporate grants and scholarships; fifth, the advertising that reaches out to women to create a more female-supportive atmosphere; and sixth, special grants for science programs at leading women's colleges.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 25.

Women, Men, School, Law

“One of the most spiritual things you can do is acknowledge the human aspect of your life. Once you acknowledge the human aspect of your life you'll recognize the spiritual fuel that ignites that human engine.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 98

Life

“The first time I fired up a car, felt the engine shudder and the wheel come to life in my hands, I was hooked. It was a feeling I can't describe. I still get it every time I get into a race car.”

Mario Andretti (1940) Italian-American racing driver

[Mario Andretti - Began Racing In Italy, sports.jrank.org, http://sports.jrank.org/pages/146/Andretti-Mario-Began-Racing-in-Italy.html, 2007-04-12].
1990s

Life, Cars, Feeling, Time

“This report summarizes the activities of the M. I. T. Computer-Aided Design (CAD) Project from 1 December 1959 through 3 May 1967 in the development of a generalized 'system of software systems' for generating specialized problem-solving systems using high-level language techniques and advanced computer graphics. Known as the AED Approach (for Automated Engineering Design) the Project results are applicable not only to mechanical design, as an extension of earlier development of the APT System for numerical control, but to arbitrary scientific, engineering, management, and production systems as well.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

D.T. Ross & John Erwin Ward (1968). Investigations in computer-aided design for numerically controlled production http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/755/FR-0351-19563962.pdf?sequence=1. Electronic Systems Laboratory, Electrical Engineering Dept., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. p. iii Abstract.

Problem

“Cartography is about representation. This statement may seem obvious, but it has been overlooked in our search for organizing principles for the field. Rather than restricting research in cartography to maps that present well-defined messages (and suggesting a single, map-engineering approach to improving the transmission of these messages, as the communication approach did), attention to maps as spatial representation expands the field.”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

Source: How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995), p. 1

Search, Communication

“When the time-table is so arranged as to call for speed nearly equal to the full capacity of the engine, it is very obvious that the risks of failure in making time, must be much greater than at reduced rates, and when they do occur, the efforts made to gain time must be correspondingly greater and uncertain. A train whose prescribed rate of speed is thirty miles per hour, having lost five minutes of time, and being required to gain it, in order to meet and pass an opposing train at a station ten miles distant, must necessarily increase its speed to forty miles an hour; and a train whose rate of speed is 40 miles per hour, under similar circumstances, must increase its speed to 60 miles per hour.”

Daniel McCallum (1815–1878) Canadian engineer and early organizational theorist

Source: Report of the Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad to the Stockholders (1856), p. 42; Cited in: Scientific American April 19, 1856. p. 254 ( online http://books.google.com/books?id=tuw8AQAAIAAJ&pg=PA254#v=onepage&q&f=false); and Vose (1857, p. 429)

Failure, Effort, Distant, Time

“The writer feels that management is also destined to become more of an art, and that many of the, elements which are now believed to be outside the field of exact knowledge will soon be standardized tabulated, accepted, and used, as are now many of the elements of engineering.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) American mechanical engineer and tennis player

Source: Shop Management, 1903, p. 1373.

Art, Feeling, Knowledge

“Parliament is a potent engine, and its enactments must always do something, but they very seldom do what the originators of these enactments meant.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Statement to the Associated Chambers of Commerce (March 1891)
1890s

“You may regret this, but you will soon notice that is a good idea to give chance a chance in the further creation of new brands of vehicles. This will make available a source of intelligence that is much more powerful than any engineering mind.”

Valentino Braitenberg (1926–2011) Italian-Austrian neuroscientist

Source: Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (1984), p. 26

Intelligence, Idea, Chance

“Today 29-9-34 ion the garden, rockery side, looking up to the house where Bone was working, sky bluish, very gentle, I looked without theories or self consciousness. This happens very seldom, though I can prolong the delight if I prevent my engines from restarting.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 95

Housing

“Engineering has long been conceded a place as one of the modern arts, and has become a well-defined science, with a large and growing literature of its own, and of late years has subdivided itself into numerous and distinct divisions, one of which is that of mechanical engineering. It will probably not be disputed that the matter of shop management is of equal importance with that of engineering, as affecting the successful conduct of most, if not all, of our great industrial establishments, and that the management of works has become a matter of such great and far-reaching importance as perhaps to justify its classification also as one of the modern arts.”

Henry R. Towne (1844–1924) American engineer

Source: "The Engineer as an Economist," 1886, p. 428-9

Art, Literature, Science, Success

“The purpose and real value of systems engineering is… to keep going around the loop; find inadequacies and make improvements.”

Robert E. Machol (1917–1998) American systems engineer

Source: Mathematicians are useful (1971), p. 1

“Before the Industrial Revolution all techniques in use were supported by very narrow epistemic bases. That is to say, the people who invented them did not have much of a clue as to why and how they worked. The pre-1750 world produced, and produced well. It made many path-breaking inventions. But it was a world of engineering without mechanics, iron-making without metallurgy, farming without soil science, mining without geology, water-power without hydraulics, dye-making without organic chemistry, and medical practice without microbiology and immunology. The main point to keep in mind here is that such a lack of an epistemic base does not necessarily preclude the development of new techniques through trial and error and simple serendipity. But it makes the subsequent wave of micro-inventions that adapt and improve the technique and create the sustained productivity growth much slower and more costly. If one knows why some device works, it becomes easier to manipulate and debug it, to adapt to new uses and changing circumstances. Above all, one knows what will not work and thus reduce the costs of research and experimentation.”

Joel Mokyr (1946) Israeli American economic historian

Joel Mokyr, " The knowledge society: Theoretical and historical underpinnings http://ehealthstrategies.comnehealthstrategies.comnxxx.ehealthstrategies.com/files/unitednations_mokyr.pdf." AdHoc Expert Group on Knowledge Systems, United Nations, NY. 2003.

People, World, Error, Support

“Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.”

Alan Kay (1940) computer scientist

ACM Queue A Conversation with Alan Kay Vol. 2, No. 9 - Dec/Jan 2004-2005 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 2000s, A Conversation with Alan Kay, 2004–05

People, Education, Way, Understanding

“An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose. (7) Very little development will be required. It will use off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now. On the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated.”

Hyman George Rickover (1900–1986) United States admiral

Paper Reactors, Real Reactors (1953)

Problem, Study, Light, Time

“Industrial age companies created sharp distinctions between two groups of employees. The intellectual elite—managers and engineers—used their analytical skills to design products and processes, select and manage customers, and supervise day-to-day operations. The second group was composed of the people who actually produced the products and delivered the services. This direct labor work force was a principal factor of production for industrial age companies, but used only their physical capabilities, not their minds. They performed tasks and processes under direct supervision of white-collar engineers and managers. At the end of the twentieth century, automation and productivity have reduced the percentage of people in the organization who perform traditional work functions, while competitive demands have increased the number of people performing analytic functions: engineering, marketing, management, and administration. Even individuals still involved in direct production and service delivery are valued for their suggestions on how to improve quality, reduce costs, and decrease cycle times…
Now all employees must contribute value by what they know and by the information they can provide. Investing in, managing, and exploiting the knowledge of every employee have become critical to the success of information age companies”

Robert S. Kaplan (1940) American accounting academic

Source: The Balanced Scorecard, 1996, p. 5-6

People, Age, Knowledge, Time

“The analogy between management and engineering has the unwholesome effect of taking management one further step away from governance. Engineering, like science, music, and theology, knows no national boundaries, and this is why scientists, artists, and theologians— often to their credit— make statesmen uneasy. Such men and women operate from a different normative base from those who govern. Despite the salience of the NAFTAs, the WTOs, and the EUs of this world, governing remains overwhelmingly the business of nation-states.”

John Rohr (1934–2011) American political scientist

Source: Civil servants and their constitutions, 2002, p. ix

Women, Men, World, Music

“Operations research has many precursors and allied fields, including Taylorism (after Frederick W. Taylor), scientific management and management science, industrial engineering and systems analysis. As one early textbook explained, the roots of OR "are as old as science and the management function. Its name dates back only to 1940" (Churchman et al. 1957: 3). Certainly its practitioners have expended much energy and ink in search of an acceptable definition of OR. Morse tried unsuccessfully to halt the debate by declaring OR to be 'the activity carried on by members of the Operations Research Society' (Morse 1953: 159) But his colleagues were not so easily dissuaded from debate. Much of the concern with definition focused on the sometimes elusive distinctions between OR and neighbouring fields; the attempt to define, or redefine, OR was also born of the desire to allow the subject to evolve beyond the orthodoxy of wartime experience. Crucial considerations included the balance between model and application, and the complexity of the mathematics involved.”

Ivor Grattan-Guinness (1941–2014) Historian of mathematics and logic

Source: Companion encyclopedia of the history and philosophy of the mathematical sciences (2003), p. 841.

Search, Mathematics, Science

“The purpose of "Engineering Cybernetics" is then to study those parts of the broad science of cybernetics which have direct engineering applications in designing controlled or guided systems. It certainly includes such topics usually treated in books on servomechanisms. But a wider range of topics is only one difference between engineering cybernetics and servomechanisms engineering. A deeper - and thus more important - difference lies in the fact that engineering cybernetics is an engineering science, while servomechanisms engineering is an engineering practice.”

Qian Xuesen (1911–2009) Chinese rocket scientist

Source: Engineering cybernetics, (1954), p. vii

Books, Study, Science, Parting

“The Systems engineering method recognizes each system is an integrated whole even though composed of diverse, specialized structures and sub-functions. It further recognizes that any system has a number of objectives and that the balance between them may differ widely from system to system. The methods seek to optimize the overall system functions according to the weighted objectives and to achieve maximum compatibility of its parts.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), p. 8; Cited in: Peter Allen, Steve Maguire, Bill McKelvey (2011) The SAGE Handbook of Complexity and Management. p. 35

Optimism, Parting

“When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.”

Hassan Butt (1980) British-Pakistani activist

[Hassan, Butt, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2115891,00.html, My plea to fellow Muslims: you must renounce terror, The Observer, 2007-07-01, 2007-07-07]

People, Help, Drawing

“Art and design are not luxuries, nor somehow incompatible with science and engineering.”

Bran Ferren (1953) American technologist

To create for the ages, let's combine art and engineering, Bran, Ferren, January 23, 2018, www.ted.com, March 2014 https://www.ted.com/talks/bran_ferren_to_create_for_the_ages_let_s_combine_art_and_engineering,

Art, Science

“One kind of person is engaged in society without realizing it; another kind engages in society by controlling it. The one is a gear, a cog, and the other an engineer, a driver. But a person who has opted out has only his ability to express his disengagement between his existence and nothingness. Not cogito, but scribo, ergo sum.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

Personality

“The transition from the concept of information in the technical (communication engineering) sense to the semantic (theory of meaning) sense was indeed difficult, if not impossible.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport (1956), as quoted in: Richard C. Huseman (1977) Readings in interpersonal & organizational communication. p. 35
1950s

Communication, Sense

“Methods by which engineers stabilise their mechanisms suggest analogous possibilities for stabilising economic systems.”

Arnold Tustin (1899–1994) British engineer

Arnold Tustin (1957) " The mechanism of economic instability http://books.google.com/books?id=Nou8mkjPMPUC&pg=PA8" in: New Scientist, Oct. 27, 1957. p. 8

“Throughout the software life cycle, there are many decision situations involving limited resources in which software engineering economics techniques provide useful assistance.”

Barry Boehm (1935) American software engineer

Source: Software engineering economics. (1984), p. 4

Life, Decision

“Reality isn’t the most pleasant of atmospheres, Lieutenant. But we like to think we’re engineered for it. It’s a pretty fine piece of engineering, the kind an engineer can respect. Drag in an obsession and reality can’t tolerate it. Something has to give; if reality goes, your fine piece of engineering is left with nothing to operate on. So it operates badly. So kick the obsession out; start functioning the way you were designed to function.”

Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human

Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 3 “Morality”, p. 146

Way, Thinking, Reality

“In a society which is producing more people, more materials, more things, and more information than ever before, systems engineering is indispensable in meeting the challenge of complexity.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), p. vii; as cited in: Joseph E. Kasser (2010) " Seven systems engineering myths and the corresponding realities http://www.synergio.nl/media/59286/7_myths_of_se.pdf"

People

“The striking parallel between the economic models that are currently under discussion and some engineering systems suggests the hope that in some way the rapid progress in the development of the theory and practice of automatic control in the world of engineering may contribute to the solution of the economic problems.”

Arnold Tustin (1899–1994) British engineer

Source: The Mechanism of Economic Systems (1953), p. 1

World, Hope, Way, Problem

“In other words, there are in administration things analogous to, if not identical with, the mechanical tracts or deterministic sequence, of physics. If, for example, it is decided by government to accomplish the purpose of providing compensation at given rates for men and women employed in industry who sustain injuries in connection with their occupations, the administrator can, like the engineer, estimate in advance the probable cost of such a design, indicate the types of officers and employees necessary to administer the design, and the administrative procedures appropriate to the whole process from beginning to end. And, as in the case of the hydro-electric engineer, the administrator, later sees the results of his operations and can compare them with his advance estimates. There are more variables and incalculables in human affairs than in hydroelectric affairs, but even so administration achieves pre-determined results with an approximation which is often amazing for its exactness. If administrative designs and estimates were not realized in practice with a high degree of exactness, both industry and government would collapse.”

Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) American historian

Source: Philosophy, Science and Art of Public Administration (1939), p. 661

Women, Men

“I have called these animals destriers, borrowing an old word for war-horses. I've given them clawed feet instead of hoofs because I think the genetic engineers will give them claws too. The horse's hoofs seem to be an evolutionary mistake. To speak in Lamarckian terms, the horse has lengthened its legs by standing on its toes until it has ended up standing on one toenail. […] Cheetahs, wolves, and greyhounds all have nonretractile claws that serve them as their spikes serve runners and baseball players. Racehorses could not run as fast as they do if they did not wear aluminum or magnesium shoes.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

"Cavalry in the Age of the Autarch", in Castle of the Otter (1982), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Castle of Days (1992)
Nonfiction

War, Shoe, Thinking, Animals

“I just looked in the phone book, and called up the Executive Officer of the Servomechanisms Laboratory (Al Sise) and said, "I'm a math graduate student and would like a summer job. If you could find an electrical engineering student, I'm sure by the end of the summer we could make you an electronic calculator that would beat the pants off that little mechanical thing that Wiener has put together. Are you interested?"”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: An Interview with Douglas T. Ross (1984), p. 17.

Books, Summer

“As Oliver Cromwell said to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you might be mistaken." Life and the affairs of the living are so tangled, the world not only stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine, that all questions are conundrums, no answers "correct." Is it certain that parallel lines never meet? No. Does water freeze at 32 degrees Fahrenheit? Only probably. Shall I marry? Who can say? And yet the world's work must be done. One Oblomov is enough. Thus we learn a conventional certitude, acting as though all were light by blinking the shadow. A simple proof demonstrates that parallel lines do meet, but, on the assumption that they do not, the architect builds the skyscraper. Despite his knowledge of statistical mechanics, the engineer designs the refrigerator to maintain a constant temperature of 31 degrees. Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas [the heart has its reasons that reason does not know], and families are raised.”

Irving Younger (1932–1988) American lawyer

Some of My Life

Life, World, Family, Imagination

“Don't count on me
I engineer on every
Move we make from here
I'll take the lead
You take the pain
You see, I engineered
This game.”

Holly Knight American singer-songwriter and musician

"I Engineer"

Pain, Game

“Scientists and engineers changed the world.”

Regina E. Dugan (1963) American businesswoman, inventor, and technology developer

TED Talk, "From Mach-20 glider to Hummingbird Drone" (March 2012); also in Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2013) by Newton Lee

World, Change

“A. D. Hall's (1962) classic account of the methodology was based on his experience with the Bell Telephone Laboratories. Hall sees systems as existing in hierarchies. In systems engineering, plans to achieve a general objective must similarly be arranged in a hierarchy, with the systems engineer ensuring the internal consistency and integration of the plans, The methodology itself ensures the optimization of the system of concern with respect to its objectives. This requires a number of steps, the most important being problem definition, choosing objectives, systems synthesis, systems analysis, systems selection, system development, and current engineering. With Hall, the system of concern is usually a physical entity.”

Mike Jackson (1951) systems scientist

Michael C. Jackson (1992) Systems Methodology for the Management Sciences. p. 74; About A.D. Hall (1962)

Optimism, Problem

“No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50 thousand years of man's recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.
This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.
So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this state of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward — and so will space.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Source: 1962, Rice University speech

History, Star, Problem, Light

“Public transport is functionality for people not engineers.”

Johan Neerman (1959) Belgian architect

“Het Laatste Nieuws” (December 2001), p. 16.

People

“The Reservoir plan is an engineering mechanism applied to the field of economics, and in its essence it has nothing to do with democracy or any other political philosophy.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Part V, Chapter XIX, The Reservoir Plan and Tradition, p. 232
Storage and Stability (1937)

Democracy

“The Holy Grail of systems engineering, a generic systems methodology has been the subject of the author’s ongoing research for over 20 years.”

Derek Hitchins (1935) British systems engineer

Derek K Hitchins (2005) Systems Methodology http://sse.stevens.edu/fileadmin/cser/2005/papers/10.pdf

“The war with the Soviet Union began in June 1941, I think. And I believe it was two months later, or maybe three, that Heydrich sent for me. I reported. He said to me: "The Führer has ordered physical extermination." These were his words. And as though wanting to test their effect on me, he made a long pause, which was not at all his way. I can still remember that. In the first moment, I didn't grasp the implications, because he chose his words so carefully. But then I understood. I didn't say anything, what could I say? Because I'd never thought of a … of such a thing, of that sort of violent solution. … Anyway, Heydrich said: "Go and see Globocnik, the Führer has already given him instructions. Take a look and see how he's getting on with his program. I believe he's using Russian anti-tank trenches for exterminating the Jews." As ordered, I went to Lublin, located the headquarters of SS and Police Commander Globocnik, and reported to the Gruppenführer. I told him Heydrich had sent me, because the Führer had ordered the physical extermination of the Jews. … Globocnik sent for a certain Sturmbannführer Höfle, who must have been a member of his staff. We went from Lublin to, I don't remember what the place was called, I get them mixed up, I couldn't say if it was Treblinka or some other place. There were patches of woods, sort of, and the road passed through — a Polish highway. On the right side of the road there was an ordinary house, that's where the men who worked there lived. A captain of the Ordnungspolizei welcomed us. A few workmen were still there. The captain, which surprised me, had taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, somehow he seemed to have joined in the work. They were building little wooden shacks, two, maybe three of them; they looked like two- or three-room cottages. Höfle told the police captain to explain the installation to me. And then he started in. He had a, well, let's say, a vulgar, uncultivated voice. Maybe he drank. He spoke some dialect from the southwestern corner of Germany, and he told me how he had made everything airtight. It seems they were going to hook up a Russian submarine engine and pipe the exhaust into the houses and the Jews inside would be poisoned.
I was horrified. My nerves aren't strong enough … I can't listen to such things… such things, without their affecting me. Even today, if I see someone with a deep cut, I have to look away. I could never have been a doctor. I still remember how I visualized the scene and began to tremble, as if I'd been through something, some terrible experience. The kind of thing that happens sometimes and afterwards you start to shake. Then I went to Berlin and reported to the head of the Security Police.”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

Source: Eichmann Interrogated (1983), p. 75 - 76.

Men, War, Way, Thinking

“Militant leftism in politics appears to have its roots in broadly analogous sentiments. Every labour politician has observed that the most indignant members of his local Party are not usually the poorest, or the slum-dwellers, or those with most to gain from further economic change, but the younger, more self-conscious element, earning good incomes and living comfortably in neat new council houses: skilled engineering workers, electrical workers, draughtsmen, technicians, and the lower clerical grades. (Similarly the most militant local parties are not in the old industrial areas, but either in the newer high-wage engineering areas or in middle-class towns; Coventry or Margate are the characteristic strongholds.) Now it is people such as these who naturally resent the fact that despite their high economic status, often so much higher than their parents’, and their undoubted skill at work, they have no right to participate in the decisions of their firm, no influence over policy, and far fewer non-pecuniary privileges than the managerial grades; and outside their work they are conscious of a conspicuous educational handicap, of a style of life which is still looked down on by middle-class people often earning little if any more, of differences in accent, and generally of an inferior class position.”

Anthony Crosland book The Future of Socialism

The Future of Socialism by Anthony Crosland
The Future of Socialism (1956)

Life, People, Education, Nature

“When we started work on setting up a polyester filament yarn project, my chemical engineering and business school background helped me in organizing the work, creating reporting structures, motivating people… in all this, my father and Rasikbhai were two steps ahead of me.”

Mukesh Ambani (1957) Indian business magnate

Always invest in businesses of the future and in talent

People, School, Motivation, Business

“The great masses, who have never been, in the history of mankind, more subject to hypnotic suggestion than they are right now, have become the puppets of the “public opinion” that is engineered by the newspapers in the service, it need hardly be emphasized, of the reigning powers of finance. What is printed in the morning editions of the big city newspapers is the opinion of nine out of ten readers by nightfall. The United States of America, whose more rapid “progress” enables us to predict the future on a daily basis, has pulled far ahead of the pack when it comes to standardizing thought, work, entertainment, etc.”

Ludwig Klages (1872–1956) German psychologist and philosopher

Sämtliche Werke, vol. 4, p. 408, as translated by Joseph Pryce

History, Future

“The future is better than the past. Despite the crepehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands…with tools…with horse sense and science and engineering.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

Source: The Door Into Summer (1957), Chapter 12

World, Sense, Science, Past

“Machine-devoured, all his hours were given o’er to that insidious circuitry, and old grew he, unnoticing, in the service of his engines.”

Michael Moorcock book The Sword of the Dawn

Book 1, Chapter 3 “Elvereza Tozer” (p. 269)
The Sword of the Dawn (1968)

“The American Society of Civil Engineers said in 2007 that the U. S. had fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure -- roads, bridges, schools, dams -- that it would take more than a trillion and half dollars over five years to bring it back up to standard. Instead, these types of expenditures are being cut back. At the same time, public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. The well-off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by privatized providers.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)

World, School, Imagination, Communication

“So the world needs other engines to carry the growth process. And in a slow down environment in the world, an economy which can grow at 8-9% like India certainly has viable shoulders to provide the support to the global economy”

Arun Jaitley (1952–2019) Indian politician

On the 2015 Chinese stock market crash, as quoted in " India - we can take the economic lead as China stumbles http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34063295", BBC News (27 August 2015)

World, Support

“Steam engines don't answer back. You can belt them with a hammer and they say nowt.”

Fred Dibnah (1938–2004) English steeplejack and television personality, with a keen interest in mechanical engineering

Unsourced

“You might find the idea of listening to your gut feelings odd or even ridiculous. Some people I coach, normally left-brain individuals who use logic and facts all day like engineers or accountants, are not used to following their intuition and feelings. Instead of asking themselves ‘What do I feel?’, they are more comfortable asking ‘What do the facts tell me?”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, 100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living (2016) https://books.google.ae/books?idnu0lCwAAQBAJ&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIMjAE

People, Feeling, Idea

“Science packages theory, places it on a throne, and honors and protects it much like a queen. Engineers make the queen come down from the throne and scrub the floor. And if she doesn’t work, we fire her.”

Robert J. Marks II (1950) American electrical engineering researcher and intelligent design advocate

Micro evolution, as I understand it, is adaptation. And characteristic of a good design is the ability to adapt to differing environments. Evolutionary algorithms based on Darwinian evolution do not, by themselves, have the ability to create information. Christians are being subjected to the same “separate but equal” discrimination used to justify discrimination in the old Jim Crow south. ``Darwin or Design with Dr. Tom Woodward`` (audio), Thomas E. Woodward, 2011-01-15, 2011-04-28 http://podcast.den.liquidcompass.net/mgt/podcast/podcast.php?podcast_id=15595&encoder_id=153&event_id=63,

Science

“In our first pilot study we talked with clerical and production workers as well as professional and managerial people. We discovered that the professional and managerial groups were more verbal, showed a quicker grasp of the technique, and gave more and better delineated sequences of events than the clerical and production groups.
The second pilot study was restricted to managerial and professional people. On the basis of our experiences in this work, we decided to concentrate in the major sample on engineers and accountants. It was apparent in the results of this second pilot that engineers were able to give exceptionally vivid accounts of their work experiences. Since our study was still in the nature of an exploratory project, it was vital to us that we mine where the metal was richest.”

Frederick Herzberg (1923–2000) American psychologist

Source: The motivation to work, 1959, p. 32

People, Nature, Study

“When an attacking force laid siege to a castle, they used techniques and weapons not unlike those developed by the ancient Romans. First they surrounded the castle in order to cut off all avenues of escape and resupply. They also built a camp ringed by ditches and palisades to secure their own position. Then they built siege engines—great stonethrowing devices—which they hoped would break down the castle walls. Although the knights’ chivalric code gave pride of place in warfare to a charge on horseback with lance or to hand-to-hand combat with swords, military engineers skilled in the mechanics of offensive engines had to first break through the walls. To breach the walls the army used battering rams, various kinds of projectiles, and mines. In other words they tried to go through, over, or under the walls.”

Marilyn Stokstad (1929–2016) art historian

Source: Medieval castles (2005), Ch. 2 : The Castle as Fortress : The Castle and Siege Warfare

Hope

“Here is my recommendation for President Trump and the new Congress. Turn immediately to our glorious national institutions, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, for a report to the nation on the key areas for science and technology investments in the coming generation. Ask them to recommend an organizational strategy for a science-based scaling up of national and global R&D efforts. Call on America’s research universities to add their own brainstorming to the work of the national academies. Later in 2017, the president and Congress should then meet in a joint session of Congress to set forth a new technology vision for the nation and an R&D strategy to achieve it.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs (1954) American economist

"Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable," w:Good Reads, https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/53895656-building-the-new-american-economy-smart-fair-and-sustainable

Effort, Universe, Science

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Quotes about engineer
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