Engineers Quotes

“In this world . . .

It's Heaven when:
The French are chefs
The British are police
The Germans are engineers
The Swiss are bankers
And the Italians are lovers

It's Hell when:
The English are chefs
The Germans are police
The French are engineers
The Swiss are lovers
And the Italians are bankers.”
― Hidekaz Himaruya, Hetalia: Axis Powers, Vol. 2

“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

“Trinity’s witnesses responded just as those to Apollo 11 would, as J. Robert Oppenheimer remembered: "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent." Oppenheimer later said the he beheld his radiant blooming cloud and thought of Hindu scripture: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Aloud, however, the physicist made the ultimate engineer comment: "It worked.”
― Craig Nelson, Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon

“To be a good professional engineer,
always start to study late for exams.
Because it teaches you how to
manage time and tackle emergencies.”
― Aamir Sarfraz (aamir rajput khan)

“My belief is, either you understand things or you understand people. Nobody can do both. Frankly, I’m happier with things. I understand stuff like tensile strength, shearing force, ductility, work hardening, stress, fatigue. I know the same sort of things happen with people, but the rules are subtly different. And nobody’s ever paid for my time to get to know about people”
― K.J. Parker, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

“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 brain can be put to better use by reducing anxiety, just as reducing friction between threads can increase the torque transferred to the axial load.”
― Haresh Sippy

“This is what makes them good engineers. Perfectionism: incinerating perfectionism.”
― Ellen Ullman, The Bug

“One has to look out for engineers—they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb.”
― Marcel Pagnol

“Because of the tendency of engineers to focus more on engineering matters rather than on archaeology, history, or anthropology, they are often accused of stripping artifacts of their cultural context and cherrypicking the evidence. Yet as an engineer, I strongly argue that the engineering context is, in fact, a cultural context in and of itself--one that is less susceptible to ambiguity than the cultural context of mummies and potsherds, which can be added decades or even centuries after a building has been completed.”
― Christopher Dunn, Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs

“The Sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited that good part;
But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the careful soul and the troubled heart.
And because she lost her temper once, and because she was rude to the Lord her Guest,
Her Sons must wait upon Mary's Sons, world without end, reprieve, or rest.

It is their care in all the ages to take the buffet and cushion the shock.
It is their care that the gear engages; it is their care that the switches lock.
It is their care that the wheels run truly; it is their care to embark and entrain,
Tally, transport, and deliver duly the Sons of Mary by land and main.”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Years Between

“Meanwhile, the original programmers will have left, and their replacements -- believing they understand the code -- will make some truly spectacular errors, mistakes that will suddenly make everything completely stop working for a while. So that what had seemed to be a descending curve of bugs, a fall toward the ever-receding zero, will reveal itself as the shape of another equation altogether: a line of relentlessly rising, bug-counts climbing in an endless battle against infinity.”
― Ellen Ullman, The Bug

“The people who work with solar photovoltaics (PV) tend to be sick, I've worked with many of them. They were showing classic symptoms of Radio Wave Sickness (RWS).”
― Steven Magee

“This is an awesome(probably not very famous) one liner in hindi on engineers. I could not stop myself: Aamir Sarfraz (aamir rajput khan)

"Chaar saal lagte hai insaan ko engineer banne mein phir chahe wo puri zindgi laga rahe dubara insaan nahi ban sakta"

Translation in English:
"It takes four years for a uman to become engineer after that even if he tries for whole life he can't become human again”
― Aamir Sarfraz (aamir rajput khan)

“A good businessman knows how to make a profit. An engineer makes sure it runs well. We need more leaders who are task oriented.”
― Phil Mitchell

“Engineering is the art and science of nuts and bolts.”
― Haresh Sippy

“They were mostly in their 20s and 30s, and, with a few exceptions, were playing a major role in a program for the first or second time. In many ways they resembled the teams that made up the Apollo Project: young engineers, often right out of school, with seemingly limitless confidence and energy. NASA people who worked on Apollo and stayed with the agency for twenty years or more hold the fondest memories for that frantic period and time of their life. In interviews for this book, there often was a similar sense of nostalgia and accomplishment among the F-8 DFBW alumni. However, if for many of those immersed in Apollo the rest of their careers seemed anti-climatic, this is not true of the F-8 engineers. They went on to several more projects before many of them landed on the administrative floor of Center Building 4800, each with challenges comparable to those of the fly-by-wire program.”
― James Tomayko, Computers In Spaceflight: The NASA Experience

“Engaging specialists in interpreting ancient artifacts in Egypt is absolutely necessary in establishing a credible hypothesis. Without their input, there cannot be a comprehensive understanding of the past. For instance, the pyramids on the Giza Plateau were built not by Egyptologists or archaeologists but by engineers and craftsmen. It is not surprising, therefore, that Egyptologists overlook engineering features and nuances that would be recognized immediately by those who are trained in those disciplines.”
― Christopher Dunn, Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs

“Florida is full of long-range, unending road jobs that break the backs, pocketbooks, and hearts of the roadside business. The primitive, inefficient, childlike Mexicans somehow manage to survey, engineer, and complete eighty miles of high-speed divided highway through raw mountains and across raging torrents in six months. But the big highway contractors in Florida take a year and a half turning fifteen miles of two-lane road across absolutely flat country into four-lane divided highway.
The difference is in American know-how. It's know-how in the tax problems, and how to solve them. The State Road Department says a half-year contract will cost the State ten million, and a one-year contract will cost nine, and a year-and-a-half deadline will go for eight. Then Doakes can take on three or four big jobs simultaneously, and lease the equipment from a captive corporation. and listlessly move the equipment from job to job, and spread it out to gain the biggest profit. The only signs of frantic activity can be two or three men with cement brooms who look at first like scarecrows but, when watched carefully, can be perceived to move, much like the minute hand on a clock.”
― John D. MacDonald, Pale Gray for Guilt

“The engineering mountain managers went to the summit of Mauna Kea two to three days per week, whereas the technicians went there four days per week. It was apparent to me that the technicians were sicker than the engineers.”
― Steven Magee

“An engineer is a machine for turning coffee into designs (apologies to Paul Erdős)”
― Larrie D. Ferreiro

“The space shuttle Challenger disaster was a classic example of what happens when engineers are overruled by incompetent managers.”
― Steven Magee

“People with an engineering-oriented mind will tend to look at everything around as an engineering problem. This is a very good thing in engineering, but when dealing with cats, it is a much better idea to hire veterinarians than circuit engineers…”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“Инженеры человеческих душ”
― Yury Olesha

“Engineers - making the world a better, safer, happier place.”
― J. Luke Bennecke, Waterborne

“Most electrical engineers have never seen an exploded fuse, as they are very rare!”
― Steven Magee

“The mobile industry quickly developed, and lawyers, investment bankers, consultants and contractors offered their services. The feeling of ownership of the projects and the effort of getting networks up and running within the shortest possible time span was gigantic. Engineers slept in their cars to make sure that they could start early mornings, ‘war rooms’ were kitted out with huge maps, project timelines, pictures and milestone markers. Contests ongoing between different teams in the specific country regions where we were building. Employing a thousand people in no time and generating work for tenfold that number; network and other suppliers, construction companies, distributors, retailers and other often highly skilled third parties.”
― Ineke Botter, Your phone, my life: Or, how did that phone land in your hand?

“In Silicon Valley, most engineers work on projects that will never be completed- this holds true at large companies as well as small. If engineers are lucky enough to witness the rare day when the product is completed and launched, they will, in the overwhelming majority of cases, witness the product's failure in the marketplace.”
― Randall E. Stross, Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know

“...both sides, in the civil war, committed mistake when they put engineer officers at the head of large armies.... -- JAMES LONGSTREET (referring to George McClellan and Robert E. Lee), Interview with the Chicago Tribune, January 29, 1871.”
― Elizabeth Varon, Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South