Quotes about engineer
page 7

“Industry, which needs young men who are healthy, tractable, unpretentious and, I would even say, full of illusions, often receives engineers who are tired out, weak in body, and less ready than one could wish to take modest jobs and work so hard that everything seems easy to them. I am convinced that they could begin practical work much earlier and just as well prepared, by leaving things which are not used in practice out of their school education.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Source: Henri Fayol addressed his colleagues in the mineral industry, 1900, p. 909

Men, Education, School

“You can be a doctor and I’ll still help you. You can be an engineer and I can help you. You can be a scientist and I’ll help you, whoever you are because I am not helping anything else. I am helping you! Peace on this Earth doesn’t begin by great ideas. Peace on Earth begins with you.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Kissimmee, Florida, November 10, 1978
1970s

Peace, Idea, Help

“The wheel may be one of those cases where the engineering solution can be seen in plain view, yet be unattainable in evolution because it lies [on] the other side of a deep valley, cutting unbridgeably across the massif of Mount Improbable.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

[Dawkins, Richard, Richard Dawkins, Why don't animals have wheels?, Sunday Times, November 24, 1996, http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/1996-11-24wheels.shtml, October 29, 2008, http://web.archive.org/web/20070221073440/http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/1996-11-24wheels.shtml, February 21, 2007]

“It is time to employ fractal geometry and its associated subjects of chaos and nonlinear dynamics to study systems engineering methodology (SEM). Systematic codification of the former is barely 15 years old, while codification of the latter began 45 years ago… Fractal geometry and chaos theory can convey a new level of understanding to systems engineering and make it more effective”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

A.D. Hall III (1989) "The fractal architecture of the systems engineering method", in: Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part C: Applications and Reviews, IEEE Transactions on Volume 28, Issue 4, Nov 1998 Page(s):565 - 572

Understanding, Study, Time

“Fred also previously received two honorary doctorates ….. They were both given by the relevant engineering faculties, but Fred always told people that they were for "back street mechanicing."”

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

Unsourced

People

“There is a set of architectural representations produced over the process of building a complex engineering product representing the different perspectives of the different participants.”

John Zachman (1934) American computer scientist

Source: A Framework for Information Systems Architecture, 1987, p. 283. cited in: Stephen L. Montgomery (1994) Object-oriented information engineering: : analysis, design, and implementation. p. 279

“In all engineering disciplines nowadays, software engineering excluded, there exists an established engineering process to develop a system, which is accompanied by a number of suited modeling description techniques. Software engineering, being a rather new field, has not as yet established any clear methodical guidance or a fully standardized modeling notation.”

Bernhard Rumpe (1967) German computer scientist

Source: Executable Modeling with UML. A vision or a Nightmare (2002), p. 697

“In return, US surpluses of genetically engineered maize (banned in the European Union) were being dumped on the horn of Africa, in the form of emergency aid.”

Michel Chossudovsky (1946) Canadian economist

Source: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order - Second Edition - (2003), Chapter 9, Wreaking Ethiopia's Peasant Economy, p. 141

“Within the past ten years there have appeared with increasing frequency books, articles, conferences, and monograms dealing with system engineering, system analysis, system design, the systems approach, the design of systems, system theory, and problems of systems engineering. The number of publications and the stature of their authors does not allow the dismissal of the subject as a passing fad. The breadth of engineering activity involved in even a cursory examination of recent publications is of interest… It is therefore obvious that whatever Systems Engineering may or may not be, it is non-sectarian and encompasses activities that are of concern in all phases of engineering. On the other hand undergraduate college offerings akin to Systems Engineering are rather limited and even graduate programs are not extensive.”

Allen B. Rosenstein (1920–2018) American systems engineers

Source: Systems engineering and Modern Engineering Design (1965), p. 1.

Books, Problem, Appearance, Past

“I love the sound of those engines.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

about Formula One cars, quoted at Indy 500 Speedway. Hot Race, Hot Folks At Indy 500 Speedway http://press.xtvworld.com/article12011.html June 9, 2006

Love

“Trains, planes, cars, rockets, telescopes, tires, telephones, radios, television, electricity, atomic energy, computers, and fax machines. All miracles made possible by the minds and spirits of men with names like Ampere, Bell, Caselli, Edison, Ohm, Faraday, Einstein, Cohen, Teller, Shockley, Hertz, Marconi, Morse, Popov, Ford, Volta, Michelin, Dunlop, Watt, Diesel, Galileo, and other "dead white males." … The great majority of advancements past and present have been brought about by the genius and inventiveness of that most "despicable" of colors and genders, the dreaded white male, or, to be exact, by specific, individual white males. This is not to discredit the many contributions coming from nonwhites, but fact is fact. Our most important and consequential inventions have come almost exclusively from white males. … If you eliminate, suppress, or debase the while male, you kill the goose that laid the golden egg. If you ace him out with "affirmative" action, exile him from the family, teach him that he's a blight on mankind, then bon voyage to our society. We will devolve into a Third World cesspool. Where has there ever before in history been a group of human beings who have brought about the likes of the Magna Carta, the U. S. Constitution, and the countless life-saving and life-improving inventions that we now enjoy? … Does this mean we should sit back and let ourselves be governed by someone just because he's a white male? Of course, it doesn't. It means simply that we shouldn't suppress anyone, including white males. Let our God-given gifts run free in a free and just society, free from the oppression and tyranny of social engineers. If anyone has gifts beyond our own—be he a white male or other—be grateful. Maybe we have gifts that in some small way can contribute something of value as well. One way or another, we're all in the same boat. Few of us have truly outstanding gifts. And most of us have to humbly accept that there are others around who are more gifted than we are. In a Democratic society, it's not for Big Brother to decide who shall thrive and who shall struggle in the hive.”

Michael Savage (1942) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, and Author

Source: The Savage Nation: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on Our Borders, Language and Culture (2003), pp. 136–138; "White Male Inventions" http://www.dadi.org/ms_dwm.htm (December 15, 1999)

Life, Men, God, World

“I would like this house to join me in paying fulsome tribute to our scientists, engineers and defence personnel whose singular achievements have given us a renewed sense of national pride and self confidence.”

Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1924–2018) 10th Prime Minister of India

Extract from Suo Motto statement made in the Parliament, after India’s underground nuclear tests conducted on 11 May 1998.[Sujata K. Dass, Atal Bihari Vajpayee: Prime Minister of India, http://books.google.com/books?id=N8wnA7EtB0IC, 1 January 2004, Gyan Publishing House, 978-81-7835-277-0, 39]

Confidence, Sense, Housing, Self-confidence

“We brought those cases because we realized that the truth is the engine of our judicial system. We didn't get the straight story, and we had to - had to - act.”

Patrick Fitzgerald (1960) American lawyer

Cheney Aide Charged With Lying in Leak Case New York Times (October 29, 2005) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/29/politics/29leak.html?pagewanted=all

Truth

“When environmentalists are wrong, it is frequently technology that they are wrong about, and they wind up supporting parochial Green goals at the cost of comprehensive ones. That happened with space technology, nuclear technology, and genetic engineering. If your default position on a new technology is suspicion, you forfeit the ability to deploy it for your own purposes. "The environmental movement has so far concentrated its attention upon the evils that technology has done rather than upon the good that technology has failed to do," says Freeman Dyson. But focusing on Green technological opportunity requires a shift in attitude toward novelty.”

Stewart Brand book Whole Earth Discipline

Whole Earth Discipline (2009), page 226.

Support, Evil

“Students are the future of this country. Quality software engineers will carve the way ahead for becoming a software global giant.”

N. R. Narayana Murthy (1946) Indian businessman

Narayana Murthy shocks with 'Mera Bharat Mahaan' quote, indicates Infosys Ltd on hiring spree, 16k jobs on offer

Way, Future, Country

“And then we come to the physics engine. Oh, the physics engine, for which so much praise has been sung. What they say is all true. It is fantastic the way you can pick up boxes, the way they fall, the way they tip over, the way they smash into bits when you hit them.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

On Half-Life 2, 26 November 2004
Fully Ramblomatic

Life, Way, Box

“[Architects and engineers] must be willing to subordinate themselves to the emerging logic of the shell’s form as it evolves through experimentation.”

Heinz Isler (1926–2009) engineer

“New Shapes for Shells.” (1960) Bulletin of the International Association for Shell Structures, no.8, Paper C-3, taken from Tessa Maurer, Elizabeth O'Grady, Ellen Tung, "Inverse Hanging Membrane: Naturtheater Grötzingen" http://shells.princeton.edu/Grotz.html ( 2013) Evolution of German Shells Forms: Efficiency of Form, Princeton University Dept. Civil and Environmental Engineering.

“If people in the organization don't understand how a company is supposed to be different, how it creates value compared to its rivals, then how can they possibly make all of the myriad choices they have to make? Every salesman has to know the strategy — otherwise, he won't know who to call on. Every engineer has to understand it, or she won't know what to build.”

Michael E. Porter (1947) American engineer and economist

Michael Porter, "The CEO as strategist," in: Henry Mintzberg, Bruce W. Ahlstrand, and Joseph Lampel (eds.). Strategy bites back: It is a lot more, and less, than you ever imagined. Pearson Education, 2005. p. 45

People, Understanding

“As Uchimaru sees things, an engineer who doesn't think TQM applies to technical activities must not understand either engineering or TQM or both. TQM is the application of the scientific method to business (pick an important problem, get the facts, analyze the facts, find the underlying truth, plan a method of improvement based on the underlying truth, systematically test it to verify that it works, standardize the new method, and then the cycle around again)”

Shoji Shiba (1930) Japanese academic

Shōji Shiba, New American TQM. Productivity press, 1993. p. 463
Shiba talks about Kiyoshi Uchimaru, who was president of NEC's main microchip design subsidiary in the 1980s.

Truth, Understanding, Business, Problem

“The old "red in tooth and claw" view of the natural economy has to be updated. We need a new metaphor for the forest, one that helps us visualize plants both sharing and competing. … Evolution's engine is fired by genetic self-interest, but this manifests itself in cooperative action as well as solo selfishness. The natural economy has as many trade unions as robber barons, as much solidarity as individualistic entrepreneurship.”

David G. Haskell (1950) writer, Biologist

"December 3rd — Litter," pages 228-229 The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature http://theforestunseen.com/ (2012)

Nature, Help, Selfishness

“No man could have written from memory Mr. Otis’s argument of four or five hours, against the acts of trade, as revenue laws, and against writs of assistance, as a tyrannical engine to execute them, the next day after it was spoken. How awkward, then, would be an attempt to do it after a lapse of fifty-seven years! Nevertheless, some of the heads of his discourse are so indelibly imprinted on my mind, that I will endeavor to give you some very short hints of them.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

1810s, Letter to William Tudor (1818)

Law, Memory

“I had learned, after all, to trust neither religion nor politics and to put my faith in the realities of metal, wood and steam, in practical engineering, whose rules could neither be changed nor made the subject of morality, so why should I show reverence for mere antiquity?”

Michael Moorcock book The City in the Autumn Stars

Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 5 (p. 262)

Faith, Religion, Reality, Learning

“Each company, ruggedly individualistic, does its best to expand efficiently and improve its own profitability. However, our pursuit of our individual businesses, which often involves transferring manufacturing and a great deal of engineering out of the country, has hindered our ability to bring innovations to scale at home. Without scaling, we don't just lose jobs—we lose our hold on new technologies. Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.”

Andrew S. Grove (1936–2016) Hungarian-born American businessman, engineer, and author

Andrew Grove, " Andy Grove: How America Can Create Jobs http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-07-01/andy-grove-how-america-can-create-jobs", Bloomberg News, July 1, 2010 New millennium

Home, Business, Country

“Since it can be argued that both science and engineering are concerned with the study of real systems and their behavior, it follows that a general theory should be concerned with the study of general systems… It suffices for the present discussion to consider a general system as an abstract analogue or model of a class of real systems. General systems theory is then a theory of general models.”

Mihajlo D. Mesarovic (1928) Serbian academic

Mesarovic (1964) cited in: Shatrughna P. Sinha (1991) Instant encyclopaedia of geography. 1. Introduction to geography. Mittal Publications, p. 467

Behavior, Study, Science

“Architects and engineers are among the most fortunate of men since they build their own monuments with public consent, public approval and often public money.”

John Prebble (1915–2001) British writer

John Prebble, in Disaster at Dundee http://books.google.co.in/books?id=WSxIAAAAMAAJ, 1956. p. 16.

Men, Money

“I realized after I'd been at MIT for a while that I had never even known the semantics of the word "engineering". You see, all my relatives and contacts were medical doctors or biology and chemistry professors. In fact, I'm almost the "black sheep" in the family for not being an MD or Ph. D. because everybody was doing that sort of thing. There was no contact at all with engineering. I didn't even know what the word meant…”

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

Source: An Interview with Douglas T. Ross (1984), p. 11; Response to the question Were there any engineering courses offered and did you take them?

Family

“From a careful determination of the amount of solar heat that which would fall per minute on an area of one square centimetre placed perpendicular to the radiation as it falls on Earth's surface and from a knowledge of the Earth's distance, we deduce that each square centimetre of the solar surface radiates on the average of about the rate of a nine horse-power engine.”

Gerald James Whitrow (1912–2000) British mathematician

"Why the Sun Shines" (18 July 1957)

Knowledge, Horse

“In these and other ways, let us move up the steep and difficult path toward comprehensive disarmament, securing mutual confidence through mutual verification, and building the institutions of peace as we dismantle the engines of war. We must not let failure to agree on all points delay agreements where agreement is possible. And we must not put forward proposals for propaganda purposes.”

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

1963, UN speech

War, Peace, Way, Confidence

“Britain is a special country. We have so many great advantages: a Parliamentary democracy where we resolve great issues about our future through peaceful debate; a great trading nation, with our science and arts, our engineering and our creativity, respected the world over. And while we are not perfect, I do believe we can be a model for the multi-racial, multi-faith democracy, where people can come and make a contribution and rise to the very highest that their talent allows.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech delivered outside outside 10 Downing Street, announcing that he would resign as prime minister after British voters chose to leave the European Union in a referendum (June 24, 2016), see David Cameron's resignation speech in full http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/24/europe/david-cameron-full-resignation-speech/ (published by CNN) 2010s, 2016

People, World, Peace, Faith

“Enterprise Engineering is not a single methodology, but a sophisticated synthesis of the most important and successful of today's change methods. "Enterprise Engineering" first explains in detail all the critical disciplines (including continuous improvement, radical reinvention of business processes, enterprise redesign, and strategic visioning). It then illustrates how to custom-design the right combination of these change methods for your organization's specific needs.”

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

Book summary
The great transition (1995)

Business, Change, Success

“The fashionable ideology that "artificial" lacks the inherent goodness of "natural" is an appealing, but hopelessly simplistic notion of the intellectually chic. Artifice is the result of a deliberate intent to make. Nature also "makes" things, using a set of basic building blocks common throughout the universe. Exchanging infinite time for deliberate design, nature has ingeniously built plants, planets, galaxies and unimaginable constructs which seem to structure the universe itself. What we call "natural" is simply the result of whatever set of rules nature has followed in fashioning our observable reality. On planet Earth, nature has manipulated the common elements to fashion everything from bacteria to the molten core of the planet. Discoveries in the "nano" technologies of bio, molecular, and micro engineering will re-edit the nomenclature of "natural" versus "unnatural", blurring if not erasing the line of distinction between "machine" and "organism", "natural" and "unnatural", "God-given" and "man-made."”

Syd Mead (1933–2019) American concept artist

Future Concepts: The World of Syd Mead, p.15, Car Styling Magazine 088, May 1992

God, Fashion, Nature, Reality

“The engine driving the Kelly system is the "law of large numbers." In a 1713 treatise on probability, Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli propounded a law that has been misunderstood by gamblers (and investors) ever since.”

William Poundstone (1955) American writer

Part Two, Blackjack, The Kelly Criterion Under The Hood, p. 102
Fortune's Formula (2005)

Law

“There's no such word, though there should be, as "adeism" or as being an "adeist", but if there was one I would say that's what I was. I don't believe that we are here as the result of a design or that by following the appropriate rituals we can overcome death. If there was such a force, if there was an entity that was responsible for the beginning of the cosmos, and that also happened to be busily engineering the very laborious production of life on our little planet, it still wouldn't prove that this entity cared about us; answered prayers; cared what church we went to, or whether we went to one at all; cared who we had sex with or in what position or by what means; cared what we ate or on what day; cared whether we lived or died. There's no reason at all why this entity isn't completely indifferent to us. You cannot get from deism to theism - except by a series of extraordinarily generous (to yourself) assumptions. The deist has all his work still ahead of him to show that it leads to revelation; to redemption; to salvation; or to suspensions of the natural order.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Christopher Hitchens vs. William Lane Craig, 04/04/2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KBx4vvlbZ8&t=42m38s 2000s, 2009

Life, Death, Sex, Nature

“In order for a car to have personality, an X factor, the company that makes it must be able to take guidance and inspiration from one man, the man who started the company in the first place. This did not happen with the car outside my window, which was undoubtedly built in a jungle clearing by a company that makes cars to make money. No one began Proton or Hyundai or Daewoo because they harboured a dream of making something extraordinary or special. They are just enormous engineering and construction conglomerates that have been told by their respective governments to make cars so that the locals can get off their oxen and get modern.”

Jeremy Clarkson (1960) English broadcaster, journalist and writer

Rolls-Royce, p. 18
I Know You Got Soul (2004)

Money, Dreams, Cars, Personality

“As for some countries’ concerns about Russia's possible aggressive actions, I think that only an insane person and only in a dream can imagine that Russia would suddenly attack NATO. I think some countries are simply taking advantage of people’s fears with regard to Russia. They just want to play the role of front-line countries that should receive some supplementary military, economic, financial or some other aid. Therefore, it is pointless to support this idea; it is absolutely groundless. But some may be interested in fostering such fears. I can only make a conjecture.

For example, the Americans do not want Russia's rapprochement with Europe. I am not asserting this, it is just a hypothesis. Let’s suppose that the United States would like to maintain its leadership in the Atlantic community. It needs an external threat, an external enemy to ensure this leadership. Iran is clearly not enough – this threat is not very scary or big enough. Who can be frightening? And then suddenly this crisis unfolds in Ukraine. Russia is forced to respond. Perhaps, it was engineered on purpose, I don’t know. But it was not our doing.

Let me tell you something – there is no need to fear Russia. The world has changed so drastically that people with some common sense cannot even imagine such a large-scale military conflict today. We have other things to think about, I assure you.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

2015-06-06, Interview to the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/49629 2011 - 2015

People, World, Fear, Dreams

“Nature, in providing us with combustibles on all sides, has given us the power to produce, at all times and in all places, heat and the impelling power which is the result of it. To develop this power, to appropriate it to our uses, is the object of heat-engines.”

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

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

Nature, Time

“Liberals have developed a utopian vision of how nature should behave. It must remain in perfect balance. To that end, they’ll exterminate harmless critters that violate the liberal idea of Order; of species correctness. While animals may not migrate illegally, or disrupt the preordained ‘natural’ order—liberal social engineers encourage non-indigenous peoples to mess with the social habitat of historic, host populations. Provided they’re white.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"The Curious Case of America's Waning Whites" http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/08/the-curious-case-of-americas-waning-whites/ The Daily Caller, December 8, 2016 2010s, 2016

People, Idea, Nature, Animals

“The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But, swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said;
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 123

Wolf, Drawing

“In their evolution, we see that the earliest pterosaurs were small, and yet still unnecessarily heavy and clumsy, both in the air and on the ground, but 160 million years of refinement has honed their abilities to the limit of incidental engineering. Despite their enormity, they were unbelievably lightweight; even the biggest ones were estimated at less than 500 lbs. They had hollow pneumatic bones of large diameter but only millimeters thick, making a strut-supported tubular frame that's surprisingly strong and highly resistant to the stresses of aeronautics. They also had extraordinarily powerful wing muscles, and this made them capable of vaulting airborne in a single bolt. Once in the air, muscle strands and tendons in the membrane of the wing itself worked with a network of pycnofibres to give them all the data they needed for subtle adjustments to the shape of the wing. The portions of the brain which were dedicated to flight, balance and visual gaze stabilization in birds are all larger and more adapted in pterosaurs. In fact, scientists are now convinced that these animals had such a mastery of flight, that the larger ones could even cross oceans, going 80 mph at 15,000 feet for thousands of miles on a single launch.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Pterosaurs are Terrible Lizards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_htQ8HJ1cA (December 3, 2013)

Support, Bird, Strong, Animals

“It would be pleasant to believe that the age of pessimism is now coming to a close, and that its end is marked by the same author who marked its beginning: Aldous Huxley. After thirty years of trying to find salvation in mysticism, and assimilating the Wisdom of the East, Huxley published in 1962 a new constructive utopia, The Island. In this beautiful book he created a grand synthesis between the science of the West and the Wisdom of the East, with the same exceptional intellectual power which he displayed in his Brave New World. (His gaminerie is also unimpaired; his close union of eschatology and scatology will not be to everybody's tastes.) But though his Utopia is constructive, it is not optimistic; in the end his island Utopia is destroyed by the sort of adolescent gangster nationalism which he knows so well, and describes only too convincingly.
This, in a nutshell, is the history of thought about the future since Victorian days. To sum up the situation, the sceptics and the pessimists have taken man into account as a whole; the optimists only as a producer and consumer of goods. The means of destruction have developed pari passu with the technology of production, while creative imagination has not kept pace with either.
The creative imagination I am talking of works on two levels. The first is the level of social engineering, the second is the level of vision.”

Dennis Gabor (1900–1979) Nobel Prize-winning physicist and inventor of holography

In my view both have lagged behind technology, especially in the highly advanced Western countries, and both constitute dangers.
Source: Inventing the Future (1963), p. 18-19

Wisdom, Books, Age, World

“The passive strength of materials of all kinds has been very fully investigated, and many new conclusions have been formed respecting it, which are of immediate importance to the architect and to the engineer, and which appear to contradict the results of some very elaborate calculations.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

Preface
A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (1807)

Appearance

“Decidedly, we are at cross-purposes. What's all this you tell [from England] about the modern movement, commercialism, etc, etc? It bears no relation to our concept of art, at any rate here... That is where the error lies. Trade serves those up to us as readily as anything else; so it is no use. Wouldn't it be better to steep ourselves in genuine nature again? I do not consider in the least that we are making a mistake, that we should turn to the steam-engine and follow the general public [ William Morris, the more traditional artist became very popular those days]... No, a thousand times no! We are here to point the way.... the remedy is to be found in nature, more than ever. Let us follow what we consider to be the proper aim, we shall see who is right. After all, money is a fragile thing; let us earn some of it, since we must, but let us keep to our role.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

In a letter to his son Lucien, 26 April 1900, as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock - , Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 148
after 1900

Money, Art, Way, Error

“The problems of subject search on the Internet are no different in principle: search engines may permit easy location of verbally expressed topics, but we still seek to improve our methods of navigation.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 11; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Search, Problem

“In short, I suggest that the programmer should continue to understand what he is doing, that his growing product remains firmly within his intellectual grip. It is my sad experience that this suggestion is repulsive to the average experienced programmer, who clearly derives a major part of his professional excitement from not quite understanding what he is doing. In this streamlined age, one of our most undernourished psychological needs is the craving for Black Magic and apparently the automatic computer can satisfy this need for the professional software engineer, who is secretly enthralled by the gigantic risks he takes in his daring irresponsibility. For his frustrations I have no remedy……”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Unknown date

Age, Sadness, Understanding, Parting

“One day stores will no longer have gender classifications. Instead the consumer decides how and what they want, rather than the social engineering of corporations. The concept of gender will be extinct.”

Lorin Morgan-Richards (1975) American poet, cartoonist, and children's writer

Speaking at Women's march in Los Angeles (21 January 2017).

“It is true that we were cautious in our planning. There were many uncertainties about how well our Lunar module systems and our Pressure suit and backpack would match the engineering predictions in the hostile lunar environment. We were operating in a near perfect vacuum with the temperature well above 200 degrees Fahrenheit with the local gravity only one sixth that of Earth. That combination cannot be duplicated here on Earth, but we tried as best we could to test our equipment for those conditions. For example, because normal air conditioning is inadequate for lunar conditions, we were required to use cold water to cool the interior of our suits. We did not have any data to tell us how long the small water tank in our backpacks would suffice. NASA officials limited our surface working time to 2 and 3/4 hours on that first surface exploration to assure that we would not expire of hyperthermia.”

Neil Armstrong (1930–2012) American astronaut; first person to walk on the moon

Letter to Robert Krulwich (2010)

Hostility, Water, Time, Perfection

“If we are to replace standard numerical probability usage with engineering judgment, why do we find such an enormous disparity between the management estimate and the judgment of the engineers? It would appear that, for whatever purpose, be it for internal or external consumption, the management of NASA exaggerates the reliability of its product, to the point of fantasy.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

Rogers Commission Report (1986)

Appearance

“Yesterday I went for the second time to the Crystal Palace. We remained in it about three hours, and I must say I was more struck with it on this occasion than at my first visit. It is a wonderful place – vast, strange, new and impossible to describe. Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created you find there, from the great compartments filled with railway engines and boilers, with mill machinery in full work, with splendid carriages of all kinds, with harness of every description, to the glass-covered and velvet-spread stands loaded with the most gorgeous work of the goldsmith and silversmith, and the carefully guarded caskets full of real diamonds and pearls worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. It may be called a bazaar or a fair, but it is such a bazaar or fair as Eastern genii might have created. It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth – as if none but supernatural hands could have arranged it this, with such a blaze and contrast of colours and marvellous power of effect. The multitude filling the great aisles seems ruled and subdued by some invisible influence. Amongst the thirty thousand souls that peopled it the day I was there not one loud noise was to be heard, not one irregular movement seen; the living tide rolls on quietly, with a deep hum like the sea heard from the distance.”

Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) English novelist and poet

Charlotte Brontë, on attending The Great Exhibition of 1851. The Brontes' Life and Letters, (by Clement King Shorter) (1907)

People, Soul, Time, Sea

“Nothing could be further from the truth than the claim that we have a choice between cutting tax and cutting unemployment, for the two go hand in hand. It is no accident that the two most successful economies in the world, both overall and specifically in terms of job creation—those of the United States and Japan—have the lowest level of tax as a proportion of GDP. Reductions in taxation motivate new businesses and improve incentives at work. They are a principal engine of the enterprise culture, on which our future prosperity and employment opportunities depend.”

Nigel Lawson (1932) British Conservative politician and journalist

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1986/mar/18/income-tax in the House of Commons (18 March 1986)

Truth, World, Motivation, Business

“The swimming hole is still in use. It has the same mudbank. It is still impossible to dress without carrying mud home in one’s inner garments. As an engineer I could devise improvements for that swimming hole. But I doubt if the decrease in mother’s grief at the homecoming of muddy boys would compensate the inherent joys of getting muddy.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

The New Day: Campaign Speeches of Herbert Hoover (1928)

Home, Boy, Joy

“The motives for conceiving modern systems engineering are to be found, at least in part, in past disasters. Arthur D. Hall III [1989] cites: the chemical plant leakage in Bhopal (1986); the explosion of the NASA Challenger space shuttle (1986) and the Apollo fire (1967); the sinking of the Titanic (1912); the nuclear explosion in Chernobyl (1986) and the disaster at Three Mile Island power plant (1979). He cites, too, the capture of markets by Japan from the U. S., the decline in US productivity and the failure of the US secondary school system. He identifies the millions of people dying of starvation every year while other nations stockpile surplus food, medical disasters such as heart disease, while governments subsidize grains used to produce high cholesterol meat, milk and eggs; and many more. One implication is clear: systems engineering faces challenges well beyond the sphere of engineering.”

Derek Hitchins (1935) British systems engineer

Source: Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering and Management (2003), p. 75-76

People, Disease, School, Food

“America is poised to lead the world for another century. Our technology engines, our innovation dynamic, and the ambition and skill of our people will propel our economy and raise our standard of living. America will remain as it is today, the envy of the world.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

2016, Remarks on Donald Trump and the 2016 race

People, World, Envy

“I find myself frequently maintaining to any young passer-by upon whose attention I can force myself that a genuinely creative career must like a milking stool stand on three legs. There must be accident, there must be sweat, there must be dissatisfaction. That one must work hard is too obvious for comment here. That one must be endowed with native dissatisfaction is very nearly as obvious, for it is the engine that drives you: dissatisfaction with the world and the arts as you find them, dissatisfaction with your own best efforts to capture the uncapturable. What is not so obvious is the support which one must gain from accident, from those dispositions of wind and stars over which one has no control.”

Robert Ardrey book Plays of Three Decades

Plays of Three Decades: Thunder Rock / Jeb / Shadow of Heroes (1968)

World, Art, Star, Support

“In April 1946, when I came to Hughes Aircraft to institute high-technology research and development, it was far from the place it was to become. Howard Hughes, I was informed, rarely came around. When he did show up, it was to take up one or another trivial issue. He would toss off detailed directions, for instance, on what to do next about a few old airplanes decaying out in the yard or what kind of seat covers to buy for the company-owned Chevrolets, or he would say he wanted some pictures of clouds taken from an airplane. An accountant from Hughes Tool Co. ((started by Howard's father)) had the title of general manager but was there only to sign checks. A few of Howard's flying buddies were on the payroll, using assorted fanciful titles like some in Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, but apparently did next to nothing. A lawyer was on hand to process contracts, but there were practically none. In addition to the Spruce Goose flying freighter, a mammoth eight-engine plywood seaplane that barely managed to fly even once, there was an experimental Navy reconnaissance plane under development (which, with Hughes at the controls, later crashed, almost killing him). The contracts for both planes had been canceled. Perhaps, I said to myself, this is one of those unforeseeable lucky opportunities. Why not use Hughes Aircraft as a base to create a new and needed defense electronics supplier?”

Simon Ramo (1913–2016) Father of the ICBM

MEMOIRS OF AN ICBM PIONEER Simon Ramo broke with Howard Hughes, then built TRW, the company that developed the U.S. missile. He says what went right then would go wrong today. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1988/04/25/70453/index.htm in FORTUNE Magazine, April 25, 1988

Flying

“I am sort of a modern monk. My wife and I have a collection of cabins in the middle of nowhere, and we stay out of everything. We don’t go to dinners. We don’t go to cocktails. We don’t go to movies. We don’t watch TV. I don’t use my energy on other people. I just work and read. I live with myself in front of my white page. Of course, for much of the year I have to travel, speak to journalists, engineers, things like that, and it’s the worst. But from the 15th of June to the 15th of September, I live completely secluded, locked in one of my houses, working from 8 in the morning to 8 at night, or making my own biorhythm: work three hours, sleep 45 minutes, work three hours, sleep 45 minutes, for 24 hours, without eating. It’s a little sick. But I’m like Dr. Faust. I signed a contract with the devil to sell my life for creativity.”

Philippe Starck (1949) French architect and industrial designer

Starck answer to the question: "What’s the secret to working so quickly and productively?"
Life’s Work: Philippe Starck (2013)

Life, People, Travel, Sleep

“Decision theory can be pursued not only for the purposes of building foundations for political economy, or of understanding and explaining phenomena that are in themselves intrinsically interesting, but also for the purpose of offering direct advice to business and governmental decision makers. For reasons not clear to me, this territory was very sparsely settled prior to World War II. Such inhabitants as it had were mainly industrial engineers, students of public administration, and specialists in business functions, none of whom especially identified themselves with the economic sciences. Prominent pioneers included the mathematician, Charles Babbage, inventor of the digital computer, the engineer, Frederick Taylor and the administrator, Henri Fayol.
During World War II, this territory, almost abandoned, was rediscovered by scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians concerned with military management and logistics, and was renamed “operations research” or “operations analysis.””

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

So remote were the operations researchers from the social science community that economists wishing to enter the territory had to establish their own colony, which they called “management science”.
1960s-1970s, "Rational decision making in business organizations", Nobel Memorial Lecture 1978

War, World, Communication, Understanding

“My final word about editing. I was to appear on the cover of a business magazine, and the writer who came to interview me was intrigued with engineers, scientists, PhDs founding and running companies. It was somewhat more unusual back in those days than now, although it was not without ample precedents in the past. So the question he put to me right away starting the interview was, "Would you say, Dr. Ramo, that engineers make the best managers?" And I said, "Engineers make the best engineers." It may be that some engineers will have managerial talents, and be in the right place at the right time, just as may be true of lawyers or accountants or salesmen, or tax experts or whatever. Now, on the magazine then, here was this picture of me, and here was this quote: "Engineers make the best engineers." Well, someone, before the cover actually got out, knew that that was a mistake. Obviously that had been a misprint. So looking at the text, and seeing the question that was asked of me, he changed it to: "Engineers make the best managers." "I quote Dr. Ramo on engineers."”

Simon Ramo (1913–2016) Father of the ICBM

All right. An Interview Conducted by Frederik Nebeker, Center for the History of Electrical Engineering, 27 February 1995; Republished at Oral-History:Simon Ramo http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Simon_Ramo, at ieeeghn.org, accessed May 30, 2014.

Quotes, Question, Business, Appearance

“I am now engaged on the refutation of Luther's book, which refutation you will see about September 1st. I am indeed wholly averse to this kind of fighting; but what do they think is to be done by him who is attacked with edge and point? Do not all believe that in repelling an enemy he is to be kept away, and if this is to be accomplished in no other way, he is to be cut down? And must we not oppose engines to those battering-rams which caus enot theology but faith adn truth to be overthrown, friendship to perish, and whatever is sacred and in moderation to be held in contempt among mortals? That book of Luther's, what else is it than an example of denying what you a little while ago? or a fog through which you cannot see rightly the mystery of Christ? I shall put forth nothing wild against Luther - a thing hehimself ought not to have done. Since he has done it I shall remember piety and Christian decorum.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

Letter, July 21, ibid, p.288

Friendship, Truth, Books, Faith

“Few inventions have had so rapid and wide-ranging effects as the various machines which now process data and information by electronic energy. But I hope and believe that even these remarkable engines will not supersede the book as an instrument for the transfer of information. I remain sceptical, particularly when I see the advocates of the paperless society and the electronic library writing large books to support their case. I earnestly hope and believe also that libraries, as the records and memory of humanity, can form a fruitful partnership with the latest tools invented to ease the burden of our labour. Provided that these tools are efficiently operated by well-thought-out systems for organising and retrieving information, they offer the possibilities and opportunities for librarians and information specialists in all types of institution to meet the challenges of the new millennium.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Librarians and Information Systems (1995)

Books, Hope, Support, Memory

“The engines that have driven poetry's institutional success — the explosion of academic writing programs, the proliferation of subsidized magazines and presses, the emergence of a creative-writing career track, and the migration of American literary culture to the university — have unwittingly contributed to its disappearance from public view.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Universe, Success

“Information engineering has been defined with the reference to automated techniques as follows: An interlocking set of automated techniques in which enterprise models, data models and process models are built up in a comprehensive knowledge-base and are used to create and maintain data-processing systems.”

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

Source: Information Engineering (1989), p. viii

Knowledge

“Our democracy must be not only the envy of the world but the engine of our own renewal. There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

First inaugural address (January 20, 1993), Washington, D.C.
1990s

World, Democracy, Envy

“I look like an exploding tomato and shout like a jet engine and every time I see it, it makes me cringe.”

John Sweeney (journalist)

John Sweeney losting his temper with Scientologist Tommy Davis. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7348434.stm

Time

“David Tudor and I went to Hilversum in Holland to make a recording for the Dutch radio. We arrived at the studio early and there was some delay. To pass the time, we chatted with the engineer who was to work with us. He asked me what kind of music he was about to record. Since he was a Dutchman I said, 'It may remind you of the work of Mondrian.' When the session was finished and the three of us were leaving the studio, I asked the engineer what he thought of the music we had played. He said, 'It reminded me of the work of Mondrian.”

John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer

Quote from 'Lecture on Nothing', (c. 1949), in 'Silence: lectures and writings by John Cage; Publisher Middletown, Conn. Wesleyan University Press, June 1961, p. 127
this lecture had been prepared some years earlier, but was not printed until 1959, when it appeared in 'It Is', ed. Philip Pavia
1950s

Music, Time

“Women [in bed] are kind of like diesel engines. You know, it may take a little bit to get them going, but once you do, they can run a long, long time. Men, on the other hand, we're more like…bottle rockets. Ooh. Aah. <snores”

Jeff Foxworthy (1958) American stand-up comedian

Totally Committed (1998)

Women, Men, Time

“Various perspectives exist in an enterprise, such as efﬁciency, quality, and cost. Any system for enterprise engineering must be capable of representing and managing these different perspectives in a well-deﬁned way.”

Mark S. Fox (1952) Canadian computer scientist and Professor of Industrial Engineering

Michael Grüninger and Mark S. Fox (1995) " The role of competency questions in enterprise engineering http://www.eil.utoronto.ca/enterprise-modelling/papers/benchIFIP94.pdf." Benchmarking—Theory and Practice. Springer US, 1995. 22-31.

Way

“I do not overlook the important contributions to economic theory in the past whether orthodox or heterodox I correlate them with institutional economics. The classical and communistic economists used as their measure of value the man hour of labor. This is evidently since the incoming of scientific management the engineering economics of efficiency. The Austrian and hedonistic economists deriving from Bentham used as the measure of value the diminishing marginal utility of consumption goods. This is evidently the home economics recently introduced in the college curriculum.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

Source: "Institutional economics," 1936, p. 242

Home, Past

“Ours is an industrial civilization, in which no society can prosper unless it possesses an elite of highly trained scientists and a considerable army of engineers and technicians. The possession and wide dissemination of a great deal of correct, specialized knowledge has become a prime condition of national survival. In the United States, during the last twenty or thirty years, this fact seems to have been forgotten. Professional educationists have taken John Dewey's theories of ‘learning through doing’ and of ‘education as life adjustment,’ and have applied them in such a way that, in many American schools, there is now doing without learning, along with courses in adjustment to everything except the basic twentieth-century fact that we live in a world where ignorance of science and its methods is the surest, shortest road to national disaster. During the past half century every other nation has made great efforts to impart more knowledge to more young people. In the United States professional educationists have chosen the opposite course.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"Knowledge and Understanding", in Vedanta and the West (May-June 1956); later in Collected Essays (1958)

Life, People, World, Education

“The term Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is typically used to describe software development approaches in which abstract models of software systems are created and systematically transformed to concrete implementations…. Full realizations of the MDE vision may not be possible in the near to medium-term primarily because of the wicked problems involved. On the other hand, attempting to realize the vision will provide insights that can be used to signiﬁcantly reduce the gap between evolving software complexity and the technologies used to manage complexity.”

Bernhard Rumpe (1967) German computer scientist

Source: Model-driven development of complex software: A research roadmap (2007), p. 37: Abstract

Problem

“When Taylor began his efforts at the Midvale Steel Company in the 1880s, several members of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers were likewise interested in labor management. Industrial capitalism was running up against renewed resistance from the growing ranks of labor, still committed to a sense of work integrity and craftsmanship. Task management, or scientific management as it came to be called, began to take shape in the eighties as the way to break the worker's threatening resistance. The heart of this approach is the systematic reduction of work into discrete, routinized tasks, totally separated from any policy decisions about the job. … For capitalism to be firmly in control, it must monopolize information and techniques as surely as it controls the rest of the means of production. The worker must be permitted only to perform certain specific narrow tasks as planned by management.”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Source: Elements of Refusal (1988), p. 165

Way, Decision, Sense, Effort

“For Dostoevsky, Fourier is one of the industrious ant-hill engineers, busy, protected by the delusion that his goal, the will-ordered society, is the summation of all his desires.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 152

Business

“Certainly there are songs out there that are massively popular, and you can use some reverse analysis to see how they're put together, but it's difficult to reliably engineer a "hit". Add to this the constantly swirling winds of cultural taste, and you can see that the music industry is more akin to playing the lottery than anything else. Having some talent or taste can give you a bit of an edge, but it's still a huge roulette wheel..”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Andrew Sega Shrine interview, 2011

Music

“Art has poisoned our life. Aesthetics has infected everyone… If one chooses a typewriter or a sewing machine in the living room, the housewife say: 'Please take it away; it destroys the harmony of the room'. Post-cards, stamps, pouches, railway-tickets, pots umbrellas, towels, pyamas, chairs, blankets, handkerchiefs and ties – everything is 'arty'. How much more refreshing are those articles which are not called art: bathrooms, bath-tubs, bicycles, automobiles, engine-rooms and flat-irons. There are still people who can make beautiful things without art. They are the progressives.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote of Van Doesburg in his article: 'The end of art'; in 'De Stijl' series XII, 1924-5, pp. 135–136
1920 – 1926

Life, People, Beauty, Art

“My proposal is this: once this technology [genetically engineered intelligence] becomes available, why not offer it free of charge to parents on low incomes with below-average IQs? Provided there is sufficient take-up, it could help to address the problem of flat-lining inter-generational social mobility and serve as a counterweight to the tendency for the meritocratic elite to become a hereditary elite. It might make all the difference when it comes to the long-term sustainability of advanced meritocratic societies.”

Toby Young (1963) British journalist

The Quadrant (2015)

Intelligence, Problem, Parent, Help

“Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farmworkers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

1990s, Long Walk to Freedom (1995)

Education, Personality, Daughters

“The first stable conclusion I reached … was that the only thing brains could do was to approximate the responsivity to meanings that we presuppose in our everyday mentalistic discourse. When mechanical push comes to shove, a brain was always going to do what it was caused to do by current, local, mechanical circumstances, whatever it ought to do, whatever a God's-eye view might reveal about the actual meaning of its current states. But over the long haul, brains could be designed – by evolutionary processes – to do the right thing (from the point of view of meaning) with high reliability. … [B]rains are syntactic engines that can mimic the competence of semantic engines. … The appreciation of meanings – their discrimination and delectation – is central to our vision of consciousness, but this conviction that I, on the inside, deal directly with meanings turns out to be something rather like a benign "user-illusion."”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

Source: Brain Children (1998), chapter 25, "Self-Portrait"

God

“While the United States has been busy creating lawyers, we have been busier creating engineers.”

Akio Morita (1921–1999) Japanese businessman

'
Source: Made in Japan (1986), p. 173.

Business

“But you and I know the seasons are slow the rivers they froze, the wind always blows down all our dreams, the engine's out of steam. **All Of Your Days Will Be Blessed”

Ed Harcourt (1977) British musician

Dreams, Season

“Actually, even with tested missiles, results of attacks are not really mathematically predictable. The probability of extreme variations in performance, the upper and lower limits, cannot be calculated accurately. But laymen or narrow professionals persist in regarding the matter as a simple problem in engineering and physics.”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

The Magnum Opus; On Thermonuclear War

Mathematics, Problem

“Where did the second law of thermodynamics come from? …The steam engine. …The cosmos is not a steam engine.”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

Heresy Number Three
The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates (2012)

Law

“"You can never be too safe." Yes, you can. How many of us bother to inspect the hydraulic brake lines in our cars before we start the engine and head off to work? Doing so would be safer than simply assuming that the lines were intact and driving off. After all, prior to launching a space vehicle, the people at NASA make no similar assumptions. They go through a countdown of all systems, taking nothing for granted. Erring on the side of over-caution is costly, and so is erring on the side of under-caution, though for a given choice, one might be costlier than the other.”

Walter E. Williams (1936) American economist, commentator, and academic

1970s, Economics for the Citizen (1978)

People, Cars

“I found I loved playing Serious Sam (it really captured the feel of the original Doom!), and hated working a cash register, so I wrote to the only email address I could find for Croteam (one of their artists!), and talked them into letting me do a Linux port. From there, I had some luck and started collecting other work… Now I do this sort of thing full time. I've touched pretty much every major game engine of the last decade, and worked with a lot of games.”

Ryan C. Gordon (1978) Computer programmer

Quoted in Robin Heggelund Hansen, "Porting games to Linux" http://www.hardware.no/artikler/ryan_c_gordon_and_michael_simms/68450/1 hardware.no (2009-03-10)

Love, Hate, Feeling, Game

“There is very good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism itself will no longer exist—most obviously, as ecologists keep reminding us, because it's impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet, and the current form of capitalism doesn't seem to be capable of generating the kind of vast technological breakthroughs and mobilizations that would be required for us to start finding and colonizing any other planets. Yet faced with the prospect of capitalism actually ending, the most common reaction—even from those who call themselves "progressives"—is simply fear. We cling to what exists because we can no longer imagine an alternative that wouldn't be even worse.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", pp. 381–382

Fear, Imagination

“We now see that the gang of sleazy racketeers headed by John Dewey has attained its goal. We realize that the public schools have been for many years a vast brainwashing and brain-contaminating machine that has worked, on the whole, with great efficiency. It's a machine to which we send our children to have their minds filled with grotesque and debasing superstitions; to have their instincts of integrity and honor leached from their souls; to be incited to premature debauchery and perversion; to be imbued with thoughtless irresponsibility; and to be prepared for addiction to mind-destroying drugs and an existence below the animal level. The public schools have indeed been the most powerful single engine of subversion that our enemies have used upon us.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"What We Owe Our Parasites", speech (June 1968); Free Speech magazine (October and November 1995)
1960s

Children, School, Soul, Animals

“He is walking up an incline. There are tracks below him and the slow clatter of a freight, the hiss of an engine. At the top of a hill he stops to look back. He can see nothing but fog spaced with a file of blurred archlights. Then he walks on, taking pleasure in breathing, in the beat of his blood, in the tread of his feet on the pavement, between rows of otherworldly frame houses. Gradually the fog thins, a morning pearliness is seeping in from somewhere. Sunrise finds him walking along a cement road between dumping grounds full of smoking rubbishpiles. The sun shines redly through the mist on rusty donkey-engines, skeleton trucks, wishbones of Fords, shapeless masses of corroding metal. Jimmy walks fast to get out of the smell. He is hungry; his shoes are beginning to raise blisters on his big toes. At a cross-road where the warning light still winks and winks, is a gasoline station, opposite it the Lightning Bug lunchwagon. Carefully he spends his last quarter on breakfast. That leaves him three cents for good luck, or bad luck for that matter. A huge furniture truck, shiny and yellow, has drawn up outside.
"Say will you give me a lift?" he asks the redhaired man at the wheel.
"How fur ye goin?"
"I dunno.... Pretty far."”

John Dos Passos book Manhattan Transfer

Source: Manhattan Transfer (1925), pp. 403-404

Bad luck, Pleasure, Shoe, Light

“I believe leadership everywhere must continuously work to ensure that pluralism, and all its benefits, become top global priorities. In this effort, civil society has a vital role. By its very nature, civil society is pluralist because it seeks to speak for the multiple interests not represented by the state. I refer, for example, to organisations which ensure best practices such as legal societies and associations of accountants, doctors and engineers. The meritocracy they represent is the very foundation of pluralism. And meritocracy is one of the principles of democracy itself.”

Aga Khan IV (1936) 49th and current Imam of Nizari Ismailism

In a speech on Democratic Development, Pluralism and Civil Society delivered at the Nobel Institute, Oslo, Norway (7 April 2005). http://www.akdn.org/speech/nobel-institute-oslo

Democracy, Nature, Effort

“Statistical methods had taken fire in America around 1942, following a series of ten-day intensive courses for engineers, initiated by Stanford University on a suggestion from this author. The war department also gave courses at factories of suppliers. Brilliant applications attracted much attention, but the flare of statistical methods by themselves, in an atmosphere in which management did not know their responsibilities, burned, sputtered, fizzled and died out.”

W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993) American professor, author, and consultant

Source: Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position, (1982), p. 101

War, Universe

“For the roar of Godzilla, I took out the lowest string of a contrabass and then ran a glove that had resin on it across the string. The different kinds of roars were created by playing the recording of the sound that I'd made at different speeds. Toho's sound engineers previously had tried to use the roars of many different animals for Godzilla's roar. They went to a zoo and recorded the roars of many different mammals, but no matter how the sounds were manipulated, they seemed too much like the roars of each of the animals. The sound engineers also tried to alter the call of a night heron bird, but that also was not successful.”

Akira Ifukube (1914–2006) Japanese composer

As quoted by David Milner, "Akira Ifukube Interview I" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/ifukub.htm, Kaiju Conversations (December 1992)

Bird, Success, Animals, Speed

“… I do hear sometimes from programmers who are kind of sad that they don't have the opportunity to write game engines from scratch like I did and have it matter or make an impact… here's where some perspective really helps - I can remember when I was a teenager, I thought I had missed the Golden Age of 8-bit. And all of these are amazing! So, yeah, the opportunities that I had aren't there for people today - but there are new and better ones. And personally, I'm more excited about these than anything that's come before. So, thank you very much for this honor, but I'm just getting started.”

John D. Carmack (1970) American computer programmer, engineer, and businessman

BAFTA Fellowship acceptance speech, "BAFTA Games Awards 2016" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyjJrF2gJ34

People, Age, Sadness, Game

“The only engine big enough to impact Mother Nature is Father Greed.”

Thomas Friedman (1953) American journalist and author

Off to the Races, New York Times, December 19, 2009, December 22, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/opinion/20friedman.html,

Nature

“The amateur software engineer is always in search of magic, some sensational method or tool whose application promises to render software development trivial. It is the mark of the professional software engineer to know that no such panacea exist.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Grady Booch, ‎Robert A. Maksimchuk, ‎Michael W. Engle (2007) Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications Chapter 6.

“Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you're a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it's true!—but when you're a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that's why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we're a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it's not as important as these lives are—nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right, who would have thought?—but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it's four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven't figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it's gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Speech in South Carolina (19 July 2016)
2010s, 2016, July

Women, Men, People, World

“The concept of man as mass robot was both an expression of and a powerful motive force in industrialized mass society. It was the basis for behavioural engineering in commercial, economic, political and other advertising and propaganda; the expanding economy of the 'affluent society' could not subsist without such manipulation. Only by manipulating humans ever more into Skinnerian rats, robots buying automata, homeostatically adjusted conformers and opportunists (or, bluntly speaking, into morons and zombies) can this great society follow its progress toward ever increasing gross national product.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), 9. General Systems Theory in Psychology and Psychiatry, p. 206

Motivation

“You live in an age that is dominated by science and engineering. …Thus if you wish to be effective in the world and to achieve the things that you want, it is necessary to understand both science and engineering”

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

and those require mathematics
Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Age, World, Mathematics, Understanding

“Jay Hov about to change my name to Jay Peso
but in a meantime called me William H though
on a platinum Yamaha got the engine gunning
throwing it up like liquor on an empty stomach.”

Jay-Z (1969) American rapper, businessman, entrepreneur, record executive, songwriter, record producer and investor

Change the Game
The Dynasty: Roc La Familia

Change

“To suppose that chemistry and poetry are incompatible (as I am sure Prof Donnan would not do!), or that biology is inconsistent with a religious outlook on the world (I don not say with theology!) is to misunderstand entirely what the human mind, by contemplation and experiment, has achieved. By extreme specialization at intervals, by overloading the machine to its limit, discoveries and progress are made: but their bearing is best seen by letting the engine idle and giving oneself time to look around. The chemist and the poet are both right, the biologist and the saint: and each must pull up now and then to find whither he is going and to adjust his spectacles.”

Archibald Hill (1886–1977) English physiologist and biophysicist

The Ethical Dilemma of Science and Other Writings https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=zaE1AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false (1960, Cap 1. Scepticism and Faith, p. 41)

World, Time

“Right now, because of the byzantine nature of the way that we regulate in this country, if you have a cheese pizza — you make a cheese pizza — that is governed by the United States Department of Agriculture. No, it’s the other way around. I always get these backwards. If you make a cheese pizza, it’s governed by the Food and Drug Administration. If you put a pepperoni on it, that’s governed by the USDA. If you have a chicken, it’s governed by the USDA. If that chicken lays an egg, it’s governed by the FDA. But if you break the egg and make it into an omelet, that is now covered again by the USDA.
If you have open-face roast beef sandwich, that’s one or the other. But you put the bread on top of it, it’s the other one. A hotdog — the hotdog meat is governed by one. You put it in a bun, it’s governed by another. One of my favorites: If you have a saltwater fish — you have a salmon, and it’s in the ocean, it’s governed by the Department of Commerce. Once it swims up river, it’s governed by the Department of Interior. And to get there, it has to go up a fish ladder governed by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers. This is stupid. This is just — this makes no sense.”

Mick Mulvaney (1967) Director of the Office of Management and Budget

21 June 2018 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-cabinet-meeting-9/

Stupidity, Food, Way, Nature

““Organization theory,” a term that appeared in the middle of the twentieth century, has multiple meanings. When it first emerged, the term expressed faith in scientific research as a way to gain understanding of human beings and their interactions. Although scientific research had been occurring for several centuries, the idea that scientific research might enhance understanding of human behavior was considerably newer and rather few people appreciated it. Simon (1950, 1952-3, 1952) was a leading proponent for the creation of “organization theory”, which he imagined as including scientific management, industrial engineering, industrial psychology, the psychology of small groups, human-resources management, and strategy. The term “organization theory” also indicated an aspiration to state generalized, abstract propositions about a category of social systems called “organizations,” which was a very new concept. Before and during the 1800s, people had regarded armies, schools, churches, government agencies, and social clubs as belonging to distinct categories, and they had no name for the union of these categories. During the 1920s, some people began to perceive that diverse kinds of medium-sized social systems might share enough similarities to form a single, unified category. They adopted the term “organization” for this unified category.”

William H. Starbuck (1934) American academic

William H. Starbuck and Philippe Baumard (2009). "The seeds, blossoming, and scant yield of organization theory," in: Jacques Rojot et. al (eds.) Comportement organisationnel - Volume 3 De Boeck Supérieur. p. 15

People, School, Faith, Way

“This, obviously, is a fallacious argument. That same negative evidence can used to "prove" that molemen from beneath the surface of the earth have perpetrated these murders. The fact that the molemen have left no evidence behind proves how good they are at remaining hidden. That no sewer or road building projects have ever cut across their tunnels proves that politicians and engineers and other professionals are in league with the molemen. Just as obviously, anyone who denies the molemen exist is either in league with them, or is a fool who cannot see the end coming.”

Michael A. Stackpole (1957) science fiction author

Responding to fantasy-gaming opponent Patricia Pulling's suggestion that unsolved murders were likely the work of Satanists, as well as her general claims of how Satanists avoid detection
[Stackpole, Michael A., 1990, http://members.tripod.com/~limsk/pulling.htm, "The Pulling Report", Tripod.com, 2007-05-27]

Fools

“More beautiful and soft than any moth
With burring furred antennae feeling its huge path
Through dusk, the air-liner with shut-off engines
Glides over suburbs and the sleeves set trailing tall
To point the wind. Gently, broadly, she falls,
Scarcely disturbing charted currents of air.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"The Landscape near an Aerodrome"
Poems (1933)

Beauty, Feeling

Quotes about engineer page 7

Quotes about engineer
page 7