Engineering Quotes

“When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“But remember this, Japanese boy... airplanes are not tools for war. They are not for making money. Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality.”
― Hayao Miyazaki, The Wind Rises

“When Henry Ford decided to produce his famous V-8 motor, he chose to build an engine with the entire eight cylinders cast in one block, and instructed his engineers to produce a design for the engine. The design was placed on paper, but the engineers agreed, to a man, that it was simply impossible to cast an eight-cylinder engine-block in one piece.

Ford replied,''Produce it anyway.”
― Henry Ford

“Anything which is physically possible can always be made financially possible; money is a bugaboo of small minds.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

“One man’s “magic” is another man’s engineering. “Supernatural” is a null word.”
― Robert Heinlein

“All we know about the new economic world tells us that nations which train engineers will prevail over those which train lawyers. No nation has ever sued its way to greatness. ”
― Richard Lamm

“We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants—a very successful method of passing trouble from one place to the next. It solves nothing in any collective sense.”
― Aldo Leopold, For the Health of the Land: Previously Unpublished Essays And Other Writings

“The fewer moving parts, the better." "Exactly. No truer words were ever spoken in the context of engineering.”
― Christian Cantrell, Containment

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

“Incurable diseases will eventually
force mankind to justify
disruptive nanotech and genetic engineering.”
― Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident], Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza

“Kevyn, Ennesby tells me you are building a time machine.

Actually I'm finished.

In one afternoon? Wow... Does it work?

After a fashion.

...

I put a whole lot of energy into it, and the next thing I knew it was time for dinner.
-Captain Tagon & Commander Andreyasn”
― Howard Tayler, The Tub of Happiness

“Stephenson had large wrought-iron boiler plates available and he also had the courage of his calculations... The idea found its best-known expression in the Menai railway bridge opened in 1850. Stephenson's beams, which weighed 1,500 tons each, were built beside the Straits and were floated into position between the towers on rafts across a swirling tide. They were raised rather over a hundred feet up the towers by successive lifts with primitive hydraulic jacks. All this was not done without both apprehension and adventure; they were giants on the earth in those days.”
― J. E. Gordon, The New Science of Strong Materials: Or Why You Don't Fall through the Floor

“Automation is cost cutting by tightening the corners and not cutting them.”
― Haresh Sippy

“It is hardly surprising that the malodorous field of garbology has not attained the popularity of rocket science, oil exploration, or brain surgery.”
― Hans Y. Tammemagi, The Waste Crisis: Landfills, Incinerators, and the Search for a Sustainable Future

“As in real life, complex engineering designs demand a pragmatic approach.”
― Haresh Sippy

“In engineering, the joints are the most crucial. They have to be both firm and flexible, exactly like the joints in our body.”
― Haresh Sippy

“The world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better... with hands... with tools... with horse sense and science and engineering.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door Into Summer

“An hour of machine learning may foster more knowledge than centuries worth of human curiosity, but a moment of human memory contains more life than a trillion terabytes of machine memory.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“Creation is not random; it is engineered.”
― Joey Lawsin, Inscription by Design

“The rules are there to support and protect us”
― Uncredited

“AI without ethics is hollow, innovation without wisdom is dangerous.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“We don't need AI in every gadget, we don't need CRISPR in every baby. We don't need to abandon tech and live in caves, but that's what will happen if we keep using tech haphazardly.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“We don't need AI in every gadget, we don't need CRISPR in every baby.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“AI without ethics is hollow, innovation without wisdom is dangerous. Progress without humanity is regression, abundance without awareness is derangement.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“When I was toiling away in Intro to Civil Engineering and Econ 101, no one told me how much excelling in a professional setting came down to looking the busiest.”
― Ellie Palmer, Four Weekends and a Funeral – Wenn der absolut Richtige zur ganz falschen Zeit kommt: Roman

“Seeing two female characters discuss science in a fictional streaming series or movie, without talking about romance, tears me up. More, please!”
― Neil A. Hogan, Hoganthology: Science Fiction and Fantasy Anthology

“There was no state of being “fixed,” Doha had learned. There was just the period between bouts of this requires attention immediately. There were certainly wrong ways to do things, but there was no one right way. If functionality was the goal, well, there were multiple routes to it, and Doha relished the freedom in that.”
― Molly Collier, The Paragon

“AI Car Design isn’t about replacing creativity; it’s about teaching machines to dream in chrome and speed. – AICars”
― AIinCars

“Some cars run on fuel, some on electricity—future cars will run on pure intelligence. – AICars”
― AIinCars