Quotes about engineer (930 quotes, page 8)

“The people in Micronesia, they not like before. Before, everybody, man and woman, they learn about the culture and navigation. But now, nobody like learn, because they use the GPS and the motorboat. But what you going to do when the GPS broke, or the engine broke? You just gonna follow the wind and the current away, and maybe die in the ocean.”

Mau Piailug (1932–2010) Micronesian navigator from the Carolinian island of Satawal and a teacher of traditional, non-instrument wa…

From Ferrar, Derek (March 2006). "Papa Mau's Legacy". Ka Wai Ola o OHA. 23 (3):13.

People , Learning

“Socialized industries should be governed by boards of directors composed of representatives of engineers, workers, and consumers.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Property (1935)

“Keith has one of those all terrain things that will come in so handy when the world ends and we need a nine-thousand -cylinder engine to drive over those hordes of blood-thirsty mutants crawling all over the video-game landscape.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Adverbs (2006), Obviously

World , Game

“Far out across the Mojave there arose the shimmer of heat. I made my way up the path to the Ford. In the seat was a copy of my book, my first book. I found a pencil, opened the book to the fly leaf, and wrote: To Camilla, with love, Arturo I carried the book a hundred yards into the desolation, toward the southeast. With all my might I threw it far out in the direction she had gone. Then I got into the car, started the engine, and drove back to Los Angeles.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust (1939), Chapter Nineteen

Love , Books , Angels , Cars

“If car manufacturers made cars according to spec the same way software vendors make software according to spec, all five wheels would be of widely differing sizes, it would take one person to steer and another to work the pedals and yet another to operate the user-friendly menu-driven dashboard, and if it would not drive straight ahead without a lot of effort, civil engineers would respond by building spiraling roads around each city.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: What obstacles do Common Lisp programmers face? http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/47a3832fab496eda (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Cars , Way , Effort , Personality

“The ideal system engineer is an engineer thoroughly versed in his field but conversant with and knowledgeable of other fields. You have to have the capability and desire to become a 'six-month expert'… You've got to want to become a generalist, too.”

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

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

Knowledge

“The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.”

Lewis Mumford book Technics and Civilization

Source: Technics and Civilization (1934), Ch. 1, sct. 2

Age

“…the information revolution. Almost everybody is sure …that it is proceeding with unprecedented speed; and …that its effects will be more radical than anything that has gone before. Wrong, and wrong again. Both in its speed and its impact, the information revolution uncannily resembles its two predecessors …The first industrial revolution, triggered by James Watt's improved steam engine in the mid-1770s…did not produce many social and economic changes until the invention of the railroad in 1829 …Similarly, the invention of the computer in the mid-1940s, …it was not until 40 years later, with the spread of the Internet in the 1990s, that the information revolution began to bring about big economic and social changes. …the same emergence of the “super-rich” of their day, characterized both the first and the second industrial revolutions. …These parallels are close and striking enough to make it almost certain that, as in the earlier industrial revolutions, the main effects of the information revolution on the next society still lie ahead.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

"The way ahead" Economist.com http://www.economist.com/ (November 2001)
1990s and later

Lie , Change , Speed

“The fact is simple. The Spitfire looked good. It was every bit as dashing as the young men who flew it, and in flight it was as graceful as any bird. Its progress through the sky seemed effortless, as though it was simply riding the breeze and its Merlin engine was only there to provide a suitable soundtrack. You had Mr. Churchill on the radio explaining that we'd never surrender, and above you had the Spitfire, and you couldn't help thinking: Yes, we can win this thing. Possibly, just possibly, the Spitfire is the greatest machine ever made.”

Jeremy Clarkson (1960) English broadcaster, journalist and writer

Spitfire, p. 276
I Know You Got Soul (2004)

Men , Bird , Thinking , Help

“The storming of the Mannerheim Line was regarded as a model of operational and tactical art. Troops were taught to overcome the enemy's protracted defense by a gradual accumulation of forces and a patient "gnawing through" of breaches in the enemy's fortifications in accordance with all the rules of engineering science. Insufficient attention was paid to questions of co-operation among different branches and services of the armed forces under rapidly changing conditions. We had to retrain ourselves under enemy fire, paying a high price for the experience and knowledge without which we could not beat Hitler's army.”

Sergei Biriuzov (1904–1964) Soviet military commander

Quoted in "The Winter War: The Soviet Attack on Finland" - Page 146 - by Eloise Engle, Eloise Paananen, Lauri Paananen - History - 1992

Art , Question , Knowledge , Science

“We see the same sort of thing in Japan. There was never a Mr. Toyota who, since he was a small boy, yearned for the day when he could build a small family hatchback that never broke down. And you can scour the history books until the sky turns green but you'll not find any mention of a young Timmy Datsun who stayed up until ten o'clock, even on school nights, devising his plan for a car with two milometers. Subarus are made by a romantic-sounding outfit called Fuji Heavy Industries. At night I bet the chairman sometimes forgets he has a car division. It'll just be another entry in his plofit and ross accounts. The only Japanese cars with even a trace of humanity are Hondas, and there's a very good reason for that. There was a Mr. Honda and he did have a vision when he was a small boy. Even today that vision still steers the engineers, and as a result there's a very definite correlation between the S2000 sports cars and those early motorbikes. It's solely because of this link with the past that I like Hondas more than any other Japanese cars.”

Jeremy Clarkson (1960) English broadcaster, journalist and writer

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

Books , School , Family , Cars

“With the subsequent strong support from cybernetics, the concepts of systems thinking and systems theory became integral parts of the established scientific language, and led to numerous new methodologies and applications -- systems engineering, systems analysis, systems dynamics, and so on.”

Fritjof Capra (1939) American physicist

Source: The Web of Life (1996), p. 46.

Support , Thinking , Strong , Parting

“In the past decade the distinction between connotation and denotation has been blurred by politics. The definitions of words should not change with every shift in the winds of public sentiment. Our society has already suffered from four decades of Situational Ethics. Heaven help us in this new era of Situational Definitions. A rocket scientist or military engineer can teach you about Sympathetic Detonations, but it is 21st Century television commentators who have introduced us to the era of Sympathetic Denotations. We now live in an Orwellian world where a semi-auto rifle is arbitrarily called an "assault rifle" if it has black plastic furniture, where a standard capacity magazine is called a "high capacity" magazine, where the confiscation and redistribution of wealth is dubbed "fairness." This also a new age when folks who are given free health care, HD televisions, free cell phones, and enough money to be able to afford air conditioning are deemed to be "living in poverty."”

James Wesley Rawles (1960) Survivalist-fiction author and blogger

The fluidity of our language is evidence that America is sliding into oblivion. Hold fast to the true meaning of words and phrases, or we are doomed.
Incendiary Words: Of Detonations and Denotations https://survivalblog.com/incendiary_words_of_detonations_and_denotations/ Survivalblog, 27 May 2013

Money , Health , Age , World

“Religions grow out of the deepest needs of individuals sharing a common awakening, and are not created by "engineers of the soul."”

Daniel Bell book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Foreword: 1978, p. xxix
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

Religion , Soul

“[In] economics… you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment. Now the spirit of such methods, called scientism by its detractors, continued into the discipline of finance as a few technicians thought their mathematical knowledge could lead them to understand markets. The practice of financial engineering came along with massive doses of pseudoscience.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

page 115
Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Mathematics , Understanding , Knowledge

“Everything was plugged in and should’ve been working, but it gave me a communication error. I got like a cave man and got so mad at it. I was completely fed up. I’m not an engineer, I’m not a computer whiz. I don’t know anything about electronics. All I know is that I want this thing to make noise, I want to write music, and it’s not working.”

Patrick Stump (1984) American musician

About using 4 track tape decks compared to GarageBand
Apple Pro Profiles

Music , Error , Communication , Madness

“Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer. Much of the complexity he must master is arbitrary complexity [… ] because they were designed by different people, rather than by God.”

Fred Brooks No Silver Bullet

Page 184.
No Silver Bullet (1986)

God , People , Faith , Nature

“My reference points were US companies. We were hugely influenced by large US chemical companies, especially DuPont. It was a very open company and we could take advantage of their learnings. The US is also a very open society. I could to go the US Association of Chemical Engineers and get the standards, data, etc.”

Mukesh Ambani (1957) Indian business magnate

Mukesh Ambani on how Reliance was built

Learning

“Among scientists, I am the second to get it [Bharat Ratna], after C. V. Raman. M. Visveswariah was an engineer, not a scientist. In that sense I am the second scientist to get it. I am happy that Kannadigas are also getting the award. My parents would always tell me to learn Kannada well in my younger days so I could be good both in Kannada and English. Learn to read and write Kannada, then you can learn English and enjoy both languages.”

C. N. R. Rao (1934) Indian chemist

Scientist wonders why nobody asks him about Dan David prize (2013)

Parent , Sense , Learning , Reading

“It is the business of the production engineer to know every single item that constitutes his finished product, and every step involved in the handling of every piece. He must know what is the most advantageous manufacturing quantity of every single item so as to secure uniformity of flow as well as economy of manufacture. He must know how long each step ought to take under the best attainable working conditions. He must be able to tell at any time the exact condition as regards quantity and state of finishedness of every part involved in his manufacturing process.”

Hugo Diemer (1870–1937) American mechanical engineer

Source: "Industrial Engineering," 1905, p. 67

Business , Time , Parting

“But in the 1950s, many universities saw an advantage in building up all of the sciences and engineering with an eye toward obtaining federal grant money. No single institution did this better than Stanford University. And no one person was more attuned to using federal grants to build a university than its dean of engineering and eventual provost, Frederick Terman. Dr. Terman, trained as an electrical engineer, was an aggressive man with insight and boundless energy. When he began as dean, Stanford University was considered a good private regional school. When he retired as provost, it was arguably the best university for research in the nation.”

Frederick Terman (1900–1982) American electronic engineer

[Stuart Rojstaczer, Gone for Good: Tales of University Life after the Golden Age, https://books.google.com/books?id=z3sdGcopBzQC&pg=PA75, 2 September 1999, Oxford University Press, 978-0-19-535205-4, 75]

Money , School , Universe , Science

“It is remarkable how much of the utilised information men possess has been derived from the observations of astronomers. The mechanism of the universe was known before Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, or Watt constructed a steam engine. The astronomers seem to have been the pioneers of every branch of human knowledge. The Old and the New Testament open astronomically: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Gen., i., I). "The wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, where is He that is born King of Jews? for we have seen His star in the east" (Matt., ii., 2). It must be remembered that the science of astronomy in one important respect differs from all other sciences. Astronomers are observers only - they ascertain causes by watching effects. They cannot interfere with or alter the causes in operation.”

William Crookes (1832–1919) British chemist and physicist

Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1898)

Men , God , Star , Knowledge

“The pressure to generate the ideas and methods attributed to Systems Engineering stems directly from the needs of 20th century society. As our frontiers have disappeared, man has turned to technology to furnish the "good life" in a rapidly shrinking, crowded world. Our interdependence upon one another has increased in direct proportion to the population increase. The race to maintain or improve the operating efficiency of society has required that the systems and mechanisms that serve the society also become increasingly complex and interdependent.
Goode and Machal have provided statistics to illustrate the above. They note that the world population increased from 800 million in 1750, to 1200 million in 1850, and 2400 million in 1950. Maximum transportation speeds went from 40 mph in 1850, and 100 mph in 1900, to commercial transport speed of 350 mph in 1950 and supersonic transport planes of over 1200 mph in the 1960's. Our communication systems are a good indication of increasing complexity. U. S. telephones jumped from 350,000 in 1900, to 55 million in 1955.”

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

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

Life , World , Communication , Idea

“The mechanical engineer today is carrying forward, under the direction of science, the work that was begun by the mechanic who first learned to chip flint or make a fire; and it is he alone that can lead the mechanic of today to a better understanding of his problems, and the capitalist to a better appreciation of their solution.”

Henry Gantt (1861–1919) American engineer

Source: Work, Wages, and Profits: Their Influence on the Cost of Living. 1910, p. 5.

Understanding , Problem , Learning , Science

“Engineers speak half–jokingly about Murphy's Law: " If anything can go wrong, it will." But complexity stands under a second law as well. Let me call it Drucker's law: "If one thing goes wrong, everything else will, and at the same time."”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 3, p. 681

Law , Time

“The simplicity attached to the operation of an electric vehicle by any person of ordinary intelligence is too well known to need comment at this point; but it is found from experience that there is the same difference in the care taken of an electric vehicle that there is among men who attend dynamos and steam engines, or drive horses, with a corresponding difference in troubles and aggravations.”

Clinton Edgar Woods (1863) American engineer

Source: The Electric Automobile (1900), p. 14; Cited in: Imes Chui (2006, p. 106)

Men , Intelligence , Horse , Personality

“This… excuse of the provocative slogans leading mechanically to stone-throwing and worse, is used routinely by biased reporters…. A procession with about 100 women members of Durga Vahini had gone out to the Ghanta Ghar area. "There they raised communal slogans, resulting in stone-pelting and bomb-throwing." (Remark the belief in mantra magic: a slogan is uttered, and hocus pocus, a bomb explodes.) This cheap excuse for a pre-planned bomb attack is even contradicted by other information in the same article…. This case proves that newspapers keep on blaming the slogan-shouters even when it is crystal-clear from their own information that the violence was premeditated and engineered by the other side.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991)

Women , Communication

“In the last two decades we have witnessed the emergence of the "system" as a key concept in scientific research. Systems, of course, have been studied for centuries, but something new has been added… The tendency to study systems as an entity rather than as a conglomeration of parts is consistent with the tendency in contemporary science no longer to isolate phenomena in narrowly confined contexts, but rather to open interactions for examination and to examine larger and larger slices of nature. Under the banner of systems research (and its many synonyms) we have also witnessed a convergence of many more specialized contemporary scientific developments… These research pursuits and many others are being interwoven into a cooperative research effort involving an ever-widening spectrum of scientific and engineering disciplines. We are participating in what is probably the most comprehensive effort to attain a synthesis of scientific knowledge yet made.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Ackoff (1959), "Games, Decisions and Organizations," General Systems, 4 (1959), p. 145-150; cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) General System Theory. p. 9.
1950s

Nature , Knowledge , Effort , Study

“In April of 1959, ten of this country's leading scholars forgathered on the campus of Purdue University to discuss the nature of information and the nature of decision… What interests do these men have in common?… To answer these questions it is necessary to view the changing aspect of the scientific approach to epistemology, and the striking progress which has been wrought in the very recent past. The decade from 1940 to 1950 witnessed the operation of the first stored- program digital computer. The concept of information was quantified, and mathematical theories were developed for communication (Shannon) and decision (Wald). Known mathematical techniques were applied to new and important fields, as the techniques of complex- variable theory to the analysis of feedback systems and the techniques of matrix theory to the analysis of systems under multiple linear constraints. The word "cybernetics" was coined, and with it came the realization of the many analogies between control and communication in men and in automata. New terms like "operations research" and "system engineering" were introduced; despite their occasional use by charlatans, they have signified enormous progress in the solution of exceedingly complex problems, through the application of quantitative ness and objectivity.”

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

Source: Information and Decision Processes (1960), p. vii

Men , Communication , Mathematics , Question

“It was there [India] I realised that engineering was not my cup of tea. I proceeded to London to look for avenues and got myself enrolled into Hornsey College of Art there. Initially, there was no hope for me, but one exhibition in 1979 made me. That proved to be extremely lucky for me.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

Anish Kapoor: An unknown Indian

Hope , Art , Tea

“Mr Mayor and gentlemen - I have great pleasure in associating myself in how ever humble and transitory manner with this great and splendid undertaking. I am glad to be associated with an enterprise which I hope will carry still further the prosperity and power of Liverpool, and which will carry down the name of Liverpool to posterity as the place where a great mechanical undertaking first found its home. Sir William Forwood has alluded to the share which this city took in the original establishment of railways. My memory does not quite carry me back to the melancholy event by which that opening was signalised, but I can remember that which presents to my mind a strange contrast with the present state of things. Almost the earliest thing I can recollect is being brought down here to my mother's house which is close in the neighbourhood, and we took two days on the road, and had to sleep half way. Comparing that with my journey yesterday I feel what an enormous distance has been traversed in the interval, and perhaps a still larger distance and a still more magnificent rate of progress will be achieved before a similar distance of time has elapsed from the present day. I will not detain you in a room where it is perhaps difficult to hear. Of all my oratorical efforts, the one which I find most difficult to achieve is that of competing with a steam engine. Occasionally you are invited to do it at railway stations, and I know distinguished statesmen who do it with effect, but I think I have never ventured to compete in that line. I will therefore, though with some fear and trembling, fulfil the injunctions of Sir William Forwood, and proceed to handle the electric machinery which is to set this line in motion. I only hope the result will be no different from what he anticipates.”

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

At the opening of the Liverpool Overhead Railway, 4 February 1893. Quoted in the Liverpool Echo of the same day, p. 3
1890s

Pleasure , Fear , Hope , Way

“To take away to-day from England her steam-engines would be to take away at the same time her coal and iron. It would be to dry up all her sources of wealth, to ruin all on which her prosperity depends, in short, to annihilate that colossal power.”

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

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

Time , Dependency , Wealth

“Architecture is defined as the art and science of creating buildings. Systems engineering may be similarly defined as the art and science of creating systems.”

Derek Hitchins (1935) British systems engineer

Source: Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering and Management (2003), p. 309; partly cited in: Kurt A. Richardson, Wendy J. Gregory, Gerald Midgley (2006) Systems Thinking and Complexity Science. p. 39

Art , Science

“.. the number of the engine [of the train], its profile shown in the upper part of the picture, its wind-cutting fore-part in the center, symbolical of parting, indicates the features of the scene that remain indelibly impressed upon the mind”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

of the viewer
Quote from Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism, by Christine Poggi, Princeton University Press, 2009, p. 21
a note on his tryptich painting, he made late in 1911, containing the canvasses 'States of Mind II', 'The farewells', 'Those Who go Those who Stay'.
1911

Parting , Training

“We will talk only about machines with very simple internal structures, too simple in fact to be interesting from the point of view of mechanical or electrical engineering. Interest arises, rather, when we look at these machines or vehicles as if they were animals, in a natural environment. We will be tempted, then, to use psychological language in describing their behavior. And yet we know very well that there is nothing in these vehicles that we have not put there ourselves.”

Valentino Braitenberg (1926–2011) Italian-Austrian neuroscientist

p 2
Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (1984)

Behavior , Nature , Animals

“Now "cybernetics" is the term coined by Wiener to denote "steersmanship" or the science of control. Although current engineering usage restricts it to the study of flows in closed systems, it can be taken in a wider context, as the study of processes interrelating systems with inputs and outputs, and their structural-dynamic structure. It is in this wider sense that "cybernetics" will be used here, to wit, as system-cybernetics, understanding by "system" an ordered whole in relation to its relevant environment”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

hence one actually or potentially open
Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 38.

Understanding , Sense , Study , Science

“We dare not suggest that a civilization created by a particular people with a particular religious and racial profile, may well perish once those people are replaced or have engineered their own replacement.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"What Rep. Steve King's Racist' Statements Teach" http://dailycaller.com/2017/03/20/what-rep-steve-kings-racist-statements-teach/ The Daily Caller, March 20, 2017
2010s, 2017

People

“It is this detachment, this use of comparison, his faith in the possibility of applying scientific processes of thought to the organisation of industry, which constitute Babbage's unique contribution to the advancement of management. More than half a century before Taylor was to illuminate the same point, with far greater effect because he was a practising engineer, Babbage had stumbled on the underlying truth that there are general principles applicable to the manufacture of products by machinery, and that it is an understanding of these principles rather than the technical knowledge of how to make a particular article which is of the first importance.”

Lyndall Urwick (1891–1983) British management consultant

Vol II. p. 23 as cited in: Hopf (1947).
1940s, The Making Of Scientific Management, 1945

Truth , Faith , Understanding , Knowledge

“(Sylvia) The experienced traveler always flies first class so that when the engine falls off the plane, she’s drinking champagne.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 50

Travel , Drink

“My mother saw me being attacked. She cried when I left engineering for this cause. She understood my fight, encouraged me. I remember all those who were with me in this struggle, including two colleagues who were killed. Whenever I free children from slavery and take them back to their mothers, the tears of happiness in their eyes are like blessings of God. When I see the faces of liberated children, I find their smile of freedom divine and it gives me divine strength. I never feel I'm liberating them, rather it feels like they're giving me freedom.”

Kailash Satyarthi (1954) Indian children's rights activist

Times of India interview (2014)

God , Children , Smile , Feeling

“Well, we do not do this so that other players can make profit. We've actually been doing this for a long time and I do not know of anyone who specifically makes money off OpenBSD. They may, at best, save some money by not having to re-engineer the same software that we have already written. It is not exactly that we are letting them make a profit, but that we are doing a proper job and saving someone else from having to do the same job in a corporate setting. In our eyes, that is perhaps a waste of planet-wide engineer talents, rewriting the same thing over and over. Why can’t we just get it right once?”

Theo de Raadt (1968) systems software engineer

[Interview: Theo de Raadt on Industry and Free Software, http://en.epochtimes.com/news/5-7-5/30084.html, 2005-07-05, 2007-01-10, The Epoch Times]

Money , Time

“Stop feeling like you don't have power. Stop feeling pathetic and weak. Break out of your television-induced trance. It starts with a war growl. It starts with getting fired up, staring at yourself in the mirror, and showing some teeth, and saying "I'm a human being. I have dignity. I'm gonna resist. I'm gonna start recognizing the propaganda. I'm gonna break free from it. I'm not gonna fight with my family. I'm gonna organize with my family, and realize we're under attack by the social engineers. And I'm not gonna fight with my neighbors. We're gonna organize. Humanity's gonna come together." AAAHHH! YAAAHHH! We know we're under attack! We know it! We're breaking the conditioning! YAAAHHH! RAAAHH! We're coming for ya globalist. Coming for ya! Coming for ya! We know what you're doing! I'm sorry. I just get fired up when I think about what they're doing to us and how I wanna resist them, and how easy they are to defeat.”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

Alex Jones RANT: "We're Coming for Ya Globalist" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2okLFw9TIEI, July 2011.

War , Family , Feeling , Thinking

“The engineers are taking their stand on grounds of conscience… Conscientious objection to the law is not a criminal act. These people are our people and we should take a principled stand, together.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

Speech on Hugh Scanlon's union's rejection of the Industrial Relations Act in Wells, Somerset (23 November 1973).
1970s

People , Law

“Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.”

Eric S. Raymond (1957) American computer programmer, author, and advocate for the open source movement

Why Python? http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882

Beauty , Way , Understanding

“What we need is some financial engineers.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

Saturday Evening Post, Feb. 11, 1936

“With all this science and physics and so forth that I absorbed. I did have one early experience with engineering, however. When we got the Book of Knowledge, I found on one page a diagram for a short-wave radio. I thought it would be neat to try to make a shortwave radio, so I arranged with all the radio repairmen in the town that whenever they were going to junk a radio, they should set it aside and I would pick it up. I got all these old radios -- really classics now -- that I stripped. I had huge transformers and loudspeakers and huge condensers -- the whole works. Boxes full of this stuff. I didn't understand it. I didn't know a thing about it. I just liked to take things apart and learn how to solder. I discovered out of my collection of parts -- with the tuning condensers (with movable plates), the knobs, and all that stuff, that I had what seemed to be needed in this one page diagram of a shortwave receiver.”

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

Source: An Interview with Douglas T. Ross (1984), p. 11-12.

Books , Understanding , Knowledge , Learning

“Enterprise Engineering is the collection of those tools and methods which one can use to design and continually maintain an enterprise.”

Peter Bernus (1949) Hungarian-Australian computer scientist

Peter Bernus, ‎Laszlo Nemes, ‎Günter Schmidt (eds.) Handbook on Enterprise Architecture. 2003. p. 22; Cited in: Dennis F.X. Mathaisel (2007) Sustaining the Military Enterprise. p. 69

“There had been a lot of death in the newspapers lately. […] and then before Christmas that Pan Am Flight 103 ripping open like a rotten melon five miles above Scotland and dropping all these bodies and flaming wreckage all over the golf course and the streets of this little town like Glockamorra, what was its real name, Lockerbie. Imagine sitting there in your seat being lulled by the hum of the big Rolls-Royce engines and the stewardesses bringing the clinking drinks caddy and the feeling of having caught the plane and nothing to do now but relax and then with a roar and a giant ripping noise and scattered screams this whole cozy world dropping away and nothing under you but black space and your chest squeezed by the terrible unbreathable cold, that cold you can scarcely believe is there but that you sometimes actually feel still packed into the suitcases, stored in the unpressurised hold, when you unpack your clothes, the dirty underwear and beach towels with the merciless chill of death from outer space still in them. […] Those bodies with hearts pumping tumbling down in the dark. How much did they know as they fell, through air dense like tepid water, tepid gray like this terminal where people blow through like dust in an air duct, to the airline we're all just numbers on the computer, one more or less, who cares? A blip on the screen, then no blip on the screen. Those bodies tumbling down like wet melon seeds.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Death , People , World , Feeling

“Software engineering concerns methods and techniques to develop large software systems. The engineering metaphor is used to emphasize a systematic approach to develop systems that satisfy organizational requirements and constraints.”

Hans van Vliet (1949) Dutch computer scientist

Source: Software Engineering: Principles and Practice, 2007, p. 2

“I suggest that the hon. gentleman may be a good corporation lawyer, but he is slipping badly in his history. The capitalist system did not produce the machine age; the machine age produced the capitalist system. The material prosperity that the world has enjoyed for the last seventy-five years or one hundred years has been due to the introduction of power; steam power, then electric power and the internal combustion engine. The capitalist system or the free enterprise system - the terms are synonymous and interchangeable - was the product of the power age. The capitalist system did not produce the power age.”

Tommy Douglas (1904–1986) Scottish-born Canadian politician

Budget Debate, House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario, March 22, 1943.

Age , World , History

“Only if mathematical rigor is adhered to, can systems problems be dealt with effectively, and so it is that the systems engineer must, at least, develop an appreciation for mathematical rigor if not also considerable mathematical competence.”

A. Wayne Wymore (1927–2011) American mathematician

Source: A Mathematical Theory of Systems Engineering (1967), p. 3.

Mathematics , Problem

“Modern engineers, after having erected a viaduct, insist upon subjecting it to a severe strain by a formal trial trip, before allowing it to be opened for public traffic; and it would almost seem that God, in employing moral agents for the carrying out of His purposes, secures that they shall be tested by some dreadful ordeal, before He fully commits to them the work which He wishes them to perform.”

William Mackergo Taylor (1829–1895) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 44.

God

“The large establishment of wives and servants rendered the nobles immobile. No Indian scholars, engineers or travellers went abroad to learn the skills the Europeans were developing in their countries. While people from Europe were frequently coming to Hindustan, no Indian nobleman could go to the West because he could not live without his harem and he could not take with him his cumbersome harem to countries situated so far away. Europe at this time was forging ahead in science and technology through its Industrial Revolution, but the Mughal elites kept themselves insulated from this great stride because of inertia. Consequently, the country was pulled back from marching with progress, a deficiency which has not been able to be made up until now.”

K. S. Lal book The Mughal Harem

Source: The Mughal Harem (1988), p.203.

People , Travel , Learning , Science

“In fact, maybe Metcalfe's Law is the formula for Doug Engelbart's scaling of human knowledge, just as Watt'ssteam engine scaled human power.”

Andy Kessler (1958) American writer

Part V, The Next Barrier, Packet Racket, p. 190.
Running Money (2004) First Edition

Law , Knowledge

“[The decisionmaking role of the firm has progressed from the neoclassical standpoint of profit maximization to sales maximization, utility maximization, and satisficing. From the Operation Research point of view] …the ideal picture is that someone, presumable the firm that hires the operations researcher, hands him, on a silver platter, an objective function. By talking to the engineers, or by looking into a few scientific laws, he determines the policy alternatives available and also the model”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Source: 1970s-1980s, The Economics of Information (1984), p. 55 as cited in: Demetri Kantarelis (2008) " Book Review: Title: Theories Of The Firm 2nd Edition http://www.inderscience.com/books/TOF_american_econ_review.pdf". In: The American economist. Vol 52, Nr 1. p. 117

Law

“Great results in science and engineering are "bunched" in the same person too often for success to be a matter of random luck.”

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

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

Science , Success , Personality

“In order to better understand object-oriented methodologies in general, it helps to understand the people who make up the "object-oriented community" itself. Far from being monolithic, there is a great deal of diversity within this community. Many object-oriented people, for example, seem to focus almost entirely on programming language issues. They tend to cast all discussions in terms of the syntax and semantics of their chosen object-oriented programming language. These people find it impossible (for all intents and purposes) to discuss any software engineering activity (e. g., analysis, design, and testing) without direct mention of some specific implementation language.
Outside of producing executable "prototypes", people who emphasize programming languages seldom have well-defined techniques for analyzing their clients' problems or describing the overall architecture of the software product. A great deal of what they do is intuitive. If they happen to have a natural instinct/intuition for good analysis or good design, their efforts on small-to-medium, non-critical projects can result in respectable software solutions.”

Edward V. Berard

Source: Essays on object-oriented software engineering (1993), p. 5

People , Communication , Understanding , Nature

“The ideas set forth by organismic biologists during the first half of the twentieth century helped to give birth to a new way of thinking — "systems thinking" — in terms of connectedness, relationships, context. According to the systems view, the essential properties of an organism, or living system, are properties of the whole, which none of the parts have. They arise from the interactions and relationships among the parts. These properties are destroyed when the system is dissected, either physically or theoretically, into isolated elements. Although we can discern individual parts in any system, these parts are not isolated, and the nature of the whole is always different from the mere sum of its parts. The systems view of life is illustrated beautifully and abundantly in the writings of Paul Weiss, who brought systems concepts to the life sciences from his earlier studies of engineering and spent his whole life exploring and advocating a full organismic conception of biology.”

Fritjof Capra (1939) American physicist

Source: The Web of Life (1996), p. 29.

Life , Way , Idea , Birth

“He who travels in the Barque of Peter had better not look too closely into the engine room.”

Ronald Knox (1888–1957) English priest and theologian

Reply when asked why he did not visit Rome, quoted in Penelope Fitzgerald, The Knox Brothers (1977)

Travel

“Of the Corporation of the Goosequill — of the Press, my boy, … of the fourth estate … There she is — the great engine — she never sleeps. She has her ambassadors in every quarter of the world — her couriers upon every road. Her officers march along with armies, and her envoys walk into statesmen's cabinets. They are ubiquitous.”

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) novelist

Source: The History of Pendennis (1848-1850), Ch. 30.

World , Boy , Sleep

“You feel chilled because you have no character. You’re a depressing assemblage of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you’re perpetually on the brink of being obsolete — whether it’s labour market obsolescence or cultural unhipness. And it’s all catching up with you. You live and die by the development cycle. You’re glamorized drosophila flies, with the company regulating your life cycles at whim. If it isn’t a budget-driven eighteen-month game production schedule, it’s a five-year hardware obsolescence schedule. Every five years you have to throw away everything you know and learn a whole new set of hardware and software specs, relegating what was once critical to our lives to the cosmic slag heap.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

Life , Feeling , Game , Learning

“My first essay at making a steam engine was when I was fifteen. I then made a real working; steam-engine, 1 3/4 diameter cylinder, and 8 in. stroke, which not only could act, but really did some useful work; for I made it grind the oil colours which my father required for his painting. Steam engine models, now so common, were exceedingly scarce in those days, and very difficult to be had; and as the demand for them arose, I found it both delightful and profitable to make them; as well as sectional models of steam engines, which I introduced for the purpose of exhibiting the movements of all the parts, both exterior and interior. With the results of the sale of such models I was enabled to pay the price of tickets of admission to the lectures on natural philosophy and chemistry delivered in the University of Edinburgh. About the same time (1826) I was so happy as to be employed by Professor Leslie in making models and portions of apparatus required by him for his lectures and philosophical investigations, and I had also the inestimable good fortune to secure his friendship. His admirably clear manner of communicating a knowledge of the fundamental principles of mechanical science rendered my intercourse with him of the utmost importance to myself. A hearty, cheerful, earnest desire to toil in his service, caused him to take pleasure in instructing me by occasional explanations of what might otherwise have remained obscure.”

James Nasmyth (1808–1890) Scottish mechanical engineer and inventor

James Nasmyth in: Industrial Biography: Iron-workers and Tool-makers https://books.google.nl/books?id=ZMJLAAAAMAAJ, Ticknor and Fields, 1864. p. 337

Friendship , Pleasure , Communication , Nature

“The diagram on the opposite page, similar in plan and purpose to one devised by Mr. M. C. Rorty, represents, in a general way, the circuit flow of money. To find fault with this diagram from an engineering standpoint would not be difficult; neither would it be sensible. All we should ask of these reservoirs and pipes is that they serve the purpose at hand. In the main, subject to certain qualifica qualifications to be made presently, this diagram does serve our purpose. It pictures the flow of money when business is relatively stable.”

William Trufant Foster (1879–1950) American economist

Source: The circuit flow of money, 1922, p. 262

Money , Way , Business

“1. The several divisions and branches are in charge of superintendents, who are held responsible for the successful working of their respective divisions, and for the maintenance of proper discipline and conduct of all persons employed thereon, except such as are in the employment of other offices "acting under directions from the general superintendent's office, as herein after stated. They possess all the powers delegated by the organization to the general superintendent, except in matters pertaining to the duties of general ticket agent, general freight agent, general wood agent, telegraph "management, and engine and car repairs.”

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

Report of the Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad to the Stockholders (1856)

Cars , Success , Personality

“Hard systems viewpoints are basically those held by designers and engineers who are trying to create systems to meet an understood need in an effective and economic manner. Those in the soft camp caricature the approach as head-down, concerned with optimization, obsessed with quantitative metrics and highly pragmatic. So much so, in fact, that the term system thinking has been purloined by the soft camp as though they alone thought! The soft camp use the term engineer’s philosophy, not too endearingly, to describe the hard approach, in which the requirement is stated by a customer and the engineer satisfies the requirement without question.”

Derek Hitchins (1935) British systems engineer

Source: Putting systems to work (1992), p. 6; as cited in: Stuart Anderson (2006) "Heterogeneous Modelling of Evolution for Socio-technical Systems"

Optimism , Question , Thinking

“The managers - these administrators, experts, directing engineers, production executives, propaganda specialists, technocrats - are the only social group among almost all of whose members we find an attitude of self-confidence. Bankers, capitalist owners, liberal politicians, workers, farmers, shopkeepers-all these display, in public and private, doubts and fears and worries and gloom. But no one who comes into contact with managers will fail to have noticed a very considerable assurance in their whole bearing. They know that they are indispensable in modern society.”

James Burnham (1905–1987) American philosopher

Source: The Managerial Revolution, 1941, p. 281, as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 13-4

Fear , Confidence , Self-confidence

“In greek mythology, Antaeus was a giant who was strong as long as he had contact with the earth. When he was lifted from the earth he lost strength. So it is with engineers. They must not become isolated from the real world…”

Hyman George Rickover (1900–1986) United States admiral

The Rickover Effect (1992)

World , Strong

“To establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society, and work to their heart's content.”

Masaru Ibuka (1908–1997) Japanese businessman

Masaru Ibuka's mission statement for Sony, cited in: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2004), Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning. p. 57

Feeling , Heart , Joy

“My beautiful Grandmother -- Caroline Garlinghouse -- came from Pittsburgh -- my mother's mother. I never met her but I have followed many of her ideas -- through my mother -- And it has given me a warm spot in my heart for your city…My grandmother's brother, Fred Garlinghouse, lived in Pittsburgh, was an engineer and apparently worked for Jones & Laughlin.”

Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) film, stage, and television actress

On Stage: Kate Hepburn, Richard Rauh and old Nixon Pittsburgh Post-Gazette July 9, 2003. http://old.post-gazette.com/ae/20030709rawson0709p5.asp

Beauty , Idea , Heart

“The key issues facing managers in sales are no different than those faced by managers in other disciplines. Sales managers say they face problems such as "It takes us too long… we need to reduce the error rate." They want to know, "How do customers perceive us?" These issues are no different than those facing managers trying to improve in other fields. The systematic approaches to improvement are identical…. There should be no reason our familiar principles of quality and process engineering would not work in the sales process.”

Joseph M. Juran (1904–2008) Quality guru

Joseph M. Juran in: Paul H. Selden (1997), Sales Process Engineering: A Personal Workshop, Milwaukee, WI: ASQ Quality Press, pp. xxi–xxii

Error , Problem

“On a long, lonesome highway east of Omaha
You can listen to the engine moanin' out its one-note song.
You can think about the woman or the girl you knew the night before.
But your thoughts will soon be wandering the way they always do,
When you're ridin' sixteen hours and there's nothin' much to do.
And you don't feel much like ridin', you just wish the trip was through.”

Bob Seger (1945) American singer-songwriter

Turn the Page.
Song lyrics, Back in '72 (1973)

Way , Feeling , Girl , Thinking

“There are two fundamental ways of (re-)engineering information systems. The “formal driven” approach is based on the goal of developing and implementing a technical correct running system. The “content driven” approach is based on the goal of developing and implementing an organizational correct running system. By using reference models, content and technology can be combined in a new way”

August-Wilhelm Scheer (1941) German business theorist

Source: ARIS architecture and reference models for business process management (2000), p. 376.

Way

“The real core of what being an engineer is. You have a scientific basis, but when you don't have the science, you put in some bugger factors, some safety factors, and so forth and you get smart enough, and you get the job done anyhow, right? Economically, and as close to on time as you can make it. And if the customer is asking for something that's outlandish, give him what you can, and educate him back to what it is.”

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

Source: An Interview with Douglas T. Ross (1989), p. 25.

Education , Science , Time

“A Latino-American undergraduate who is a student of Shakespeare is not "culturally appropriating" anyone’s white-European legacy, but instead seeking transcendence of ideas and a common humanity. Asian-Americans are not “overrepresented” at premier campuses. Their high-profile presence should be praised as a model, not punished as aberrant by number-crunching bureaucrats. African-Americans who excel in physics and engineering are not “acting white” but finding the proper pathways for their natural talents. Being one-half Southeast Asian or three-quarters white is not the touchstone to one’s essence and is irrelevant to one’s character and conduct. No one is impinging on anyone’s culture when blacks dye their hair blond, or when blondes prefer to wear cornrow braids. Campuses desperately need unity czars, not diversity czars. Otherwise, we will end up as 50 separate and rival nations — just like other failed states in history whose diverse tribes and races destroyed themselves in a Hobbesian dog-eat-dog war with one another.”

Victor Davis Hanson (1953) American military historian, essayist, university professor

2010s, Diversity: History's Pathway to Chaos (2016)

War , Dogs , History , Idea

“Since I was trying to teach "style" of thinking in science and engineering, and "style" is an art, I should therefore copy the methods of teaching used for the other arts—once the fundamentals have been learned. How to become a great painter cannot be taught in words… Art teachers usually let the advanced student paint, and then make suggestions… more or less as the points arise in the student's head—which is where learning is supposed to occur!”

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

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

Art , Thinking , Learning , Teachers

“Most of the writers I know come from a variety of backgrounds: history, journalism, engineering, physics. The common element here is not what you study, but the fact that you learn how to study, to do research, and to synthesize new ideas out of old. The soul of science fiction, and perhaps even all fiction, is to look at a situation and ask, “what would happen if….” Change some variables and see how that makes people react to the situation. So, getting yourself a good grounding in any field of study will supply you with a great background wealth of material to use to build your stories. Then you really just need to start writing and keep writing. Writing is a skills-based endeavor and there is no easy way to become successful at it. Writers write.”

Michael A. Stackpole (1957) science fiction author

"Interview" at his official website http://www.michaelastackpole.com/?page_id=8

People , Way , Soul , History

“A system needs to be alive and workable even when other people than the first enthusiasts start using it. Reinvention and revolution are enthusiast stuff. Invention and evolution are engineering.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: "Well, I want to switch over to replace EMACS LISP with Guile." http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/6670472eec71d00e (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People

“At the end of the Middle Ages, castles began to lose their military func tion, but not their psychological impact as a symbol of authority. Gun powder and cannons supported armies of mercenary troops, and the garrison forts built to house them adopted the crenellated walls of private aristocratic castles. By the sixteenth century, professional soldiers lived in barracks, a few officers and the governor had finer quarters, and kings and nobles merely directed the operations from distant palaces where battle ments had become purely symbolic decoration. The Battle of Crecy be tween France and England in 1346 is traditionally considered to be the first use of cannons on the battlefield. At first the noise and smoke cre ated by the explosion terrified horses and men, and wreaked more havoc than the projectiles. Early cannons could be more dangerous for the gun ners than for the enemy, but military engineers rapidly developed the weapons’ power and accuracy. A castle’s high walls and towers made easy targets for gunners whose power and accuracy reduced once formidable medieval buildings to rubble. Mining became more successful because the attackers could put explosives under the walls.”

Marilyn Stokstad (1929–2016) art historian

Source: Medieval castles (2005), Ch. 5 : Impact and Consequences : The Afterlife of the Castle

Men , Age , Support , Distant

“The switch from 'steam engines' to 'heat engines' signals the transition from engineering practice to theoretical science.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 18, Information is Physical, The cost of forgetting, p. 154

Science

“For decades engineers have stood accused that their buildings do not have any cultural value. We have attempted to liberate engineering of this accusation. As National Socialists we are dedicated to working with boldness, but also with love of the Volk and our landscape in mind. These roads do not serve transportation alone, they also bind our Fatherland. In these highways our engineering will reflect the National Socialist movement.”

Fritz Todt (1891–1942) German engineer and senior Nazi figure

Quoted in "Deutsche Technik", June 1935, p. 270.

Love

“I've always felt that stylists such as you have in America are ashamed of a car and are preoccupied with making it look like something else, like a submarine or an airship…As an engineer, I revolt against this.”

Alec Issigonis (1906–1988) British car designer

The New York Times http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DEEDB1231F936A35753C1A96E948260&scp=1&sq=mini+issigonis&st=nyt.

Cars

“Besides the progress of industry and technique, we see a growing discontent among the masses; we see, besides the expansion ("expansion,", Fr.) of instruction, distrust and hatred expanding among nations ("s'étendre la méfiance et la haine entre," Fr.), that vie with one another ("qui rivalisent à l'envi," Fr.), by the increase of their armies and the improvement of their engines of murder”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

"engins meurtriers", Fr
Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 37 - third thought of the book, the translator.

“The socio-technical concept arose in conjunction with the first of several field projects undertaken by the Tavistock Institute in the coal-mining industry in Britain. The time (1949) was that of the postwar reconstruction of industry in relation to which the Institute had two action research projects.(2) One project was concerned with group relations in depth at all levels (including the management/labor interface) in a single organization - an engineering company in the private sector. The other project focused on the diffusion of innovative work practices and organizational arrangements that did not require major capital expenditure but which gave promise of raising productivity. The former project represented the first comprehensive application in an industrial setting of the socio-clinical ideas concerning groups being developed at the Tavistock.”

Eric Trist (1909–1993) British scientist

Source: The evolution of socio-technical systems, (1981), p. 7

Idea , Time

“These experiences are not 'religious' in the ordinary sense. They are natural, and can be studied naturally. They are not 'ineffable' in the sense the sense of incommunicable by language. Maslow also came to believe that they are far commoner than one might expect, that many people tend to suppress them, to ignore them, and certain people seem actually afraid of them, as if they were somehow feminine, illogical, dangerous. 'One sees such attitudes more often in engineers, in mathematicians, in analytic philosophers, in book keepers and accountants, and generally in obsessional people'. The peak experience tends to be a kind of bubbling-over of delight, a moment of pure happiness. 'For instance, a young mother scurrying around her kitchen and getting breakfast for her husband and young children. The sun was streaming in, the children clean and nicely dressed, were chattering as they ate. The husband was casually playing with the children: but as she looked at them she was suddenly so overwhelmed with their beauty and her great love for them, and her feeling of good fortune, that she went into a peak experience…”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: New Pathways In Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution (1972), p. 17

Love , Children , People , Books

“We tend to think that the phenomenon of engineers and scientists being at the top of a company is something that started with Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak or Gary Kildal. But this just isn’t the case. Even back in the days when IBM was the single most important computer company, it was possible for one of its engineers to escape and make an impact that disturbed even Big Blue.”

Gene Amdahl (1922–2015) American physicist

Gene Amdahl, cited in " Gene Amdahl: IBM 360 First LSI-based mainframe http://www.i-programmer.info/history/8-people/300-gene-amdahl.html" at i-programmer.info. Last Updated, 14 November 2010

Thinking

“The 19th and first half of the 20th century conceived of the world as chaos. Chaos was the oft-quoted blind play of atoms, which, in mechanistic and positivistic philosophy, appeared to represent ultimate reality, with life as an accidental product of physical processes, and mind as an epi-phenomenon. It was chaos when, in the current theory of evolution, the living world appeared as a product of chance, the outcome of random mutations and survival in the mill of natural selection. In the same sense, human personality, in the theories of behaviorism as well as of psychoanalysis, was considered a chance product of nature and nurture, of a mixture of genes and an accidental sequence of events from early childhood to maturity.
Now we are looking for another basic outlook on the world -- the world as organization. Such a conception -- if it can be substantiated -- would indeed change the basic categories upon which scientific thought rests, and profoundly influence practical attitudes.
This trend is marked by the emergence of a bundle of new disciplines such as cybernetics, information theory, general system theory, theories of games, of decisions, of queuing and others; in practical applications, systems analysis, systems engineering, operations research, etc. They are different in basic assumptions, mathematical techniques and aims, and they are often unsatisfactory and sometimes contradictory. They agree, however, in being concerned, in one way or another, with "systems," "wholes" or "organizations"; and in their totality, they herald a new approach.”

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

Source: General System Theory (1968), 7. Some Aspects of System Theory in Biology, p. 166-167 as quoted in Lilienfeld (1978, pp. 7-8) and Alexander Laszlo and Stanley Krippner (1992) " Systems Theories: Their Origins, Foundations, and Development http://archive.syntonyquest.org/elcTree/resourcesPDFs/SystemsTheory.pdf" In: J.S. Jordan (Ed.), Systems Theories and A Priori Aspects of Perception. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1998. Ch. 3, pp. 47-74.

Life , World , Way , Behavior

“In conversing with persons who are not officially attached to Observatories or in other ways professionally cognizant of the technicalities of practical Astronomy but who nevertheless display great interest… these persons appear to regard the determination of measures like those of the distance of the Sun and Moon as mysteries beyond ordinary comprehension… [and] when persons well acquainted with the general facts of Astronomy are introduced into an Observatory, they are for the most part utterly unable to understand anything which they see…
The measure of the Moon's distance involves no principle more abstruse than the measure of the distance of a tree on the opposite bank of a river. The principles of construction of the best Astronomical instruments are as simple and as closely referred to matters of common school-education and familiar experience, as are those of the common globes, the steam engine, or the turning-lathe; the details are usually less complicated.”

George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) English mathematician and astronomer

Introduction
Popular Astronomy: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Ipswich (1868)

Education , School , Way , Understanding

“To-day, artists and those who love artists seem like fossils. Imagine a megatherium or a diplodocus stalking the streets of Paris! There you have the impression that we must make upon our contemporaries. Ours is an epoch of engineers and of manufacturers, not one of artists.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Preface, p. 6-7

Love , Imagination

“The word 'cybernetics' is still new to many people, even though it has now been an accepted word of our language for some ten or fifteen years. Speaking generally, cybernetics is the scientific study of control and communication. It is an attempt to give an integrated account of both physical and biological systems in terms of their capacity to communicate between different points of the system, and in terms of their control.
There has been considerable research into general methods of communication in recent years, and this has been primarily the work of communication engineers, who are trying to discover in general terms what they themselves are doing.”

Frank Honywill George (1921–1997) British psychologist

George (1958) "Cybernetics and biology" in: M.L. Johnson Ed. New biology. Ns 26-31. p.106

People , Communication , Study

“The engineers made hard forms. Evil. With angles. They are easily broken. The world is round and soft..”

Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) Russian artist

quote, c. 1930; cited by Christina Lodder https://utopiadystopiawwi.wordpress.com/constructivism/vladimir-tatlin/letalin/, in Russian Constructivism; Yale University Press, Connecticut, 1983, p. 214
The 'Letatlin' Tatlin constructed in organic round and oval forms
Quotes, 1926 - 1954

World , Evil

“And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss, O show us
History the operator, the
Organiser, Time the refreshing river." And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
"Did you not found the city state of the sponge,"Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene. Descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."”

W. H. Auden book Spain

Source: Spain (1937), Lines 33–44

Life , History , Loss , Time

“Universities are good at producing engineers, doctors, lawyers, and such, but they often gloss over difficult moral and philosophical subjects such as the meaning of life, love, prejudice, war, and peace.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

Love , Life , War , Peace

“Although control principles are not customarily associated with international relations, there may be some significant advantages in seeing how international relations may benefit by suitable use of control concepts and methods. Over the years, control engineers and scientists have learned how to use information processing and equipment, along with energy and materials to improve the performance of various systems.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Harold Chestnut (1986) " Applications of Control Principles to International Relations http://www.ieeecss.org/CSM/library/1986/dec1986/w13-14.pdf" In: IEEE Control Systems Magazine, Vol.6, No. 6, Dec. 1986. pp. 13-14

Learning

“The writer, who as an engineer has spent most of his life in factories, is inclined to look at the basis for investment from a technological point of view… Consider … the class of industrial investments only… The situation is one of entrepreneurs and boards of directors considering, from time to time, various ’possibilities of investment’, such as extra lathes or looms, an extension to a factory, a venture in some completely new product, and so on. It is helpful to think of these ’opportunities for investment’ as existing, in a given situation, in great number and variety, whether they are at that moment under active consideration or not. When any such possibility is considered it is assessed in respect of ’expected profitability’. One may conveniently think of all possibilities of investment as ’quanta’ that can be placed in a schedule of small ranges of expected profitability according to these assessments. The placement of a given ’opportunity for investment’ on this schedule has some ’margin of uncertainty”

Arnold Tustin (1899–1994) British engineer

a curious analogy with the case of the quanta of physics
Source: The Mechanism of Economic Systems (1953), p. 103; As cited in: Prices Revalued as Information: Circuit Elements, online document 2013

Life , Thinking , Time , Help

“He had come there dissatisfied with his work, even though his multi-kinetic work was admired and winning him professional recognition. However, at that moment, other ideas were gestating and he wanted to add what he called a "fifth dimension" to his art - that of artificial intelligence. […] : [At the colony, ] he was able to turn his thoughts inward, hoping to discover the new methods and direction that would more deeply satisfy his creative needs. It was at this point, while watching the motions and patterns of sun on leaves in the New Hampshire woods one morning, that Tsai finally achieved the revelatory breakthrough that changed his art and liberated his creative energies. As he put it, he wanted to create "natural movements in dynamic equilibrium, with intelligence," and he found his solution in an unlikely combination of natural phenomenon, the precedent of Gabo's singular (and unrepeated) kinetic sculpture, and the new resource of contemporary analog and digital technology. Speaking of this moment of revelation, Tsai said that he had quite deliberately turned himself into "a sort of plant": facing his chair into the sunshine in the morning, he turned his body in stages throughout the day, mulling over ways of make an "art that presented the observer with natural movements in dynamic equilibrium, and art that could convey the awe I felt while watching sunbeams shimmer through forest leaves." But a work that would "shimmer" simply did not do enough either for the artist or viewer, Tsai concluded. It must also respond in some way to the observer; it would have to work on a new feedback principle and actually engage the observer directly. In short, a cybernetic sculpture was required. To create such radically participatory works, he understood, would require that he draw on his engineering skills rather than suppress them, as he had been trying to do in his period of oil painting.”

Sam Hunter (1923–2014) American art historian

Source: The Cybernetic Sculpture of Tsai Wen-Ying, 1989, p. 67

Hope , Art , Way , Intelligence

“It gives me great confidence and pride to think that, had the Israelites been influenced by German engineering, Paul and Timothy might have journeyed in an old Volkswagen camping van.”

Donald Miller (1971) American writer

Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)

Confidence , Thinking