Engineer Quotes & Sayings

Evolution is, as an engineer, an opportunist, not a perfectionist. — Stanislaw Lem

I am very happily employed as a full-time software engineer; I travel a lot, and I write books along with this here weekly TechCrunch column; and I still find the time to work on my own software side projects. — Jon Evans

I'm grateful to myself and those closest to me me for having given me that non-material base that means I'm a happy man, one who doesn't have to compete or engineer projects he doesn't have his heart in. — George Harrison

An osteopath is only a human engineer, who should understand all the laws governing his engine and thereby master disease. — Andrew Taylor Still

For the nerd in me, I prefer full quality digital files as they give a truer representation of the source mix, the studio in fact. From these files I can quite often tell what kind of set up made the tracks. For the music lover in me, vinyl is more woosey, richer, more alive, more real, more imperfect and somehow becoming more like life itself. But I don't prefer it per se. The mastering engineer in me always loves to hear it as it was made. — Chris McCormack

I think sometimes this is why we meditate, because when we meditate we can make the thoughts slow, and in between the thoughts is becomes a space, and in this space you have maybe something like the emptiness, the not-any-word. Maybe then we start, just a little bit start, not finish, to see the mystery without the clothes on. The naked mystery of life. We start to see the world a little bit that it is not separate one thing from the other, one person from the other, that it is maybe all the energy of the mind of the Divine Engineer, everything connected." To — Roland Merullo

Spin-off technologies are changing the culture. Even if you don't become an engineer you could be a poet, a journalist, a lawyer, but you will be thinking innovation and your actions within society, who you vote for, what you value, all become a participant in an innovation economy. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Don't drag the engine, like an ignoramus, but bring wood and water and flame, like an engineer. — Maria Weston Chapman

I can't stop watching 'Pan Am.' When I was growing up, my father worked as an engineer in Turkey, and we always flew Pan Am. The stewardesses were so glamorous! When they gave me a set of those golden wings, I felt very grown-up. Not only is the show's plot full of mystery and infidelity, they get the period details just right. — Gayle King

I have always thought of myself as an inventor first and foremost. An engineer. An entrepreneur. In that order. I never thought of myself as an employee. But my first jobs as an adult were as an employee: at IBM, and then at my first start-up. — Aaron Patzer

A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. — Freeman Dyson

Control oil and you control money. That's how you become a dominant player in the new Great Game - the one that Putin has been playing so masterfully in his effort to engineer the demise of the dollar. — Marin Katusa

To his and everybody else's way of thinking, you should build a house with your own hands before you start talking about being an engineer. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It's crazy how intelligent kids can be at a very young age and how they know what they know. I came out of the womb drawing on everything; I used to draw on my mother's white furniture and her white walls with her red lipstick and my pencils. Little did she know that would later materialize into me doing what I do now - I'm a painter as well and a micromechanical engineer. — Aldis Hodge

We live technologically, with man as the master of nature, man as the engineer, and let anyone who raises his voice against it stop using bridges not built by nature ... No electric light bulbs, no engines, no atomic energy, no calculating machines, no anaesthetics-back to the jungle. — Max Frisch

If we try to engineer outcomes, if we overturn tradition to make everyone the same, we ruin society. If we upset tradition to allow for an equal shot at the starting gate, everyone wins, except for the charlatans and would be dictators. — Ben Stein

Unfortunately, I'm an engineer. I'm always thinking about, what's the task and how do I get it done? And some of my tasks are pretty broad, and pretty fuzzy, and pretty funky, but that's the way I think. — Michael Porter

My favorite times were spent in his backyard where he and his roommates had "let nature take its course," the weeds towering above our heads. We placed two chairs in the middle of that jungle and discussed what we didn't know we were discussing: What brings a writer and an engineer together? How can we reconcile our diverse interests into a pointed goal, a single aphorism on life? More simply stated: Why are we falling in love? — Megan Rich

Boredom is a form of evil; perhaps one of Kierkegaard's characters was more correct when he said, "Boredom is the root of all evil." Boredom is a preview of death, if not itself a form of death, and when trapped in prolonged boredom, even the most saintly of us will hope for, pray for, or even engineer relief, however demonic. — Fred B. Craddock

I was one of the first practitioners of social engineering as a hacking technique, and today it is my only tool of use, aside from a smartphone - in a purely white hat sort of way. But if you don't trust me, then ask any reasonably competent social engineer. — John McAfee

In the culture of America, in a free culture, you get what you celebrate. And in this culture, we have two obsessions, become a group that becomes a group that celebrates sports heroes and entertainment heroes. There's no room left for kids to see even a little bit of the opportunities to really, really get excited about becoming an inventor, an engineer, or a scientist, a problem solver. — Dean Kamen

Juicero is the first company to make cold-pressed juice something that people can make themselves at home. The challenges to design and engineer a press that can deliver 8,000 pounds of force are tremendous. — Yves Behar

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

For me, while writing I am an engineer, so if I decide to change the format, I want to add a section, to move a section, reorganize the section, anything I want to do, I just boot words, and I do what I want to do. So, I feel completely empowered when I'm a writer. — Guy Kawasaki

You Don't Deserve to be called as an Engineer, if you feel bored when others talk about Technology. — Srinivas Shenoy

Bill Phillips was this nervous, chain-smoking student. He had signed up to be an engineer, he had gone away to fight in the Second World War, he had come back. He had switched to sociology because he wanted to understand how people could do these terrible things to each other. And he did a little bit of economics on the side. — Tim Harford

When I was young I had an apprenticeship as an engineer. — Yves Rossy

Bobby is really the one who did all the editing on that stuff. And he did all the mixing. I particularly like the record we did with Logic because Scott Harding did a great job mixing it. He's really a killing engineer. — Charlie Hunter

I am not a visionary. I'm an engineer. I'm happy with the people who are wandering around looking at the stars but I am looking at the ground and I want to fix the pothole before I fall in. — Linus Torvalds

To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. Design is how you treat your customers. If you treat them well from an environmental, emotional, and aesthetic standpoint, you're probably doing good design. — Yves Behar

How is it that mankind can engineer condoms to prevent pregnancy and STDs and not be able to invent some sort of emotional safeguard? Is it even possible to abstain from falling in love? — Daria Snadowsky

I've found that all it usually takes to draw out an engineer is to ask a couple of technical questions and then remain calm while listening to the answers. Most people tend to take on a blank, frightened look as soon as they realize that a technical explanation is under way; if you can resist giving this reaction and simply listen, your engineer will open up and tell you everything you ever wanted to know. — Margaret Lazarus Dean

You sit there waiting for the RED LIGHT to go on. You could be sitting there for five minutes, waiting, while the producer talks to the engineer. Then the light goes on you know that you mustn't make a mistake for at least 4 minutes. — Jim Sullivan

Commander Lebedev wrote - 'After a communication session we invited Flight Engineer Savitskaya to the heavily laden table. We gave Sveta a blue floral print apron and told her, " 'Look, Sveta, even though you are a pilot and cosmonaut, you are still a woman first. Would you please do us the honor of being our hostess tonight?' "
"Ouch," says Roth — Dan Simmons

I always stayed away from the studio environment as much as possible. But I just wanted to see if I could work in one. It's not easy. Just having an engineer's assistant around is enough for me to be uncomfortable. With more than one person there in the room, it feels strange. — Jack White

When your parents are Middle Eastern immigrants, you have three choices. You can become a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer. — Michael Mina

The best engineer a few decades ago was someone who could create the most beautiful beam or structure; today it's to do a structure you cannot see or understand how it's done. It disappears and you can talk only about color, symbols, and light. It's an aesthetic of miracle. — Jean Nouvel

A lawyer is either a social engineer or he is a parasite on society. — Charles Hamilton Houston

I failed in some subject but my friend pass in all,today he is an engineer in microsoft and iam is owner of microsoft.
-Bills Gate — Gangaji

You can't be a good economist unless you're also a good psychologist. Or a good engineer without being the right kind of metaphysician. — Aldous Huxley

If you asked every engineer at NASA what the worst scenario for the Hab was, they'd all answer "fire." If you asked them what the result would be, they'd answer "death by fire." But — Andy Weir

Thus when Hiroko came up and said, "Nadia, this crescent wrench is absolutely frozen in this position," Nadia sang to her, "That's the only thing I'm thinking of - baby!" and took the crescent wrench and slammed it against a table like a hammer, and twiddled the dial to show Hiroko it was unstuck, and laughed at her expression. "The engineer's solution," she explained, and went humming into the lock, thinking how funny Hiroko was, a woman who held their whole ecosystem in her head, but couldn't hammer a nail straight. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Hey, Hayley," I say as I sit down and pick up one of her action figures. She has Barbies, too, but she would rather play with her Legos and building blocks. Maybe she'll be an engineer one day. Or maybe she'll be an amazing tattoo artist like her dad. I make her action figure kiss her Barbie, and she giggles. "I think they're in love," I whisper. "Like you and my daddy," she says back quietly. I nod. And emotion clogs my throat again. I turn my head and cough, and then I dump a box of Legos on the floor. "I think Barbie needs a fortress," I say. She nods, and we start to build a plastic fortress together, because sometimes a girl just needs a fucking fortress. — Tammy Falkner

In the Internet Century, a product manager's job is to work together with the people who design, engineer, and develop things to make great products. — Eric Schmidt

No scientist, engineer, writer, psychologist, artist, or physician - and certainly no scholar, and therefore no serious university faculty member - pursues his or her vocation by getting right answers from a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity. — Leon Botstein

I actually studied engineering in school - I have a degree in mechanical engineering. But, when I got out of school, instead of going to work as an engineer, I was in a band. — Mark Frauenfelder

Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components. — Stephen Jay Gould

What does he remember? He saw the engineer Bernd close the cellar door and sit on the stairs. — Anthony Doerr

When I was little, I wanted to be a civil engineer. Not a ballerina, not a doctor, a civil engineer. I was such a nerd. — Bitsie Tulloch

What would you think of an engineer who expounded the art of flying without revealing the secrets of the engine and propeller? That's what you do, you engineer of the human soul. Just that. You're a coward. You want the raisins out of my cake but you don't want the thorns of my roses. Haven't you too, little psychiatrist, been cracking silly jokes about me? Haven't you ridiculed me as "the prophet of bigger and better orgasms"? Have you never heard the whimpering of a young wife whose body has been desecrated by an impotent husband? Or the anguished cry of an adolescent bursting with unfulfilled love? Does your security still mean more to you than your patient? How long will you go on valuing your respectability above your medical mission? How long will you refuse to see that your pussyfooting procrastination is costing millions their lives? — Wilhelm Reich

I come from a pretty scientific family. My sister is a neurologist and my brother is an engineer. — Mary Elizabeth Winstead

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

My childhood dream was to study mechanical engineering. After reading 'The Mysterious Island' - which I read 25 times as a boy - I thought that was the best thing a person could do. The engineer in the book knows mechanics and physics, and he creates a whole way of life on the island out of nothing. I wanted to be like that. — Dan Shechtman

Oh, please, no. The tag was a six-moon survey permit for Encantada, a cluster world at the edge of the Han System. It was the kind of tag a xenobioform engineer would need among a crew exploring a new world. He'd seen one once before. Five years ago. When she had left him.
His balance faltered. Vision narrowed. The universe condensed to a name, printed above the tag code.
Mica Sol. Once his. Forever his only.
He could've killed her ... — Erin Kellison

Lisa had an engineer's way of shrugging off the entire field of the humanities, all three thousand years of it, as self-indulgent fuzzy thinking. — Austin Grossman

I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to nature, it dies; and so a man. — Henry David Thoreau

Which Cromwell was, as the chief engineer of Henry's Reformation. He crushed the Roman church, looted the monasteries and nationalized faith by subordinating clergy to king. That may flatter today's reflexive anticlericalism. But we do well to remember that the centralized state Cromwell helped midwife did prepare the ground, over the coming centuries, — Anonymous

As the semantic engineer, your job is naming the parts and tightening nuts and bolts. I suggest you get back to your office and do that - right now! — John Sladek

A scientist builds in order to learn; an engineer learns in order to build. — Fred Brooks

There are smiles that actually travel along telephone wires, although no engineer at Bell Laboratories could explain how it works. — Tom Robbins

I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery. — Clyde Tombaugh

This creature's career could produce but one result, and it speedily followed. Boy after boy managed to get on the river. The minister's son became an engineer. The doctor's and the post-master's sons became 'mud clerks;' the wholesale liquor dealer's son became a barkeeper on a boat; four sons of the chief merchant, and two sons of the county judge, became pilots. Pilot was the grandest position of all. The pilot, even in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary - from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and no board to pay. Two months of his wages would pay a preacher's salary for a year. Now some of us were left disconsolate. We could not get on the river - at least our parents would not let us. — Mark Twain

Wheelchair-accessible front ramp, take a bit of getting used to, and some like the engineer never do get comfortable with them and use the less garish auditory side-doors; and the abundant sulcus-fissures and gyrus-bulges of the slick latex roof make rain-drainage complex and footing chancy at best, so there's not a whole lot of recreational strolling up here, although a kind of safety-balcony of skull-colored polybutylene resin, which curves around the midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus - a halo-ish ring at the level of like eaves, demanded by the Cambridge Fire Dept. over the heated pro-mimetic protests of topological Rickeyites over in the Architecture Dept. (which the M.I.T. administration, trying to placate Rickeyites and C.F.D. Fire Marshal both, had had the pre-molded resin injected with dyes to render it the distinctively icky brown-shot off-white of living skull, so that the balcony resembles at once corporeal bone and — David Foster Wallace

I don't know that I ever wanted greatness on its own. It seems rather like wanting to be an engineer, rather than wanting to design something - or wanting to be a writer, rather than wanting to write. It should be a by-product, not a thing in itself. Otherwise, it's just an ego trip. — Roger Zelazny

I got a degree in math, from not a good school in Texas, and then I went to work as a software engineer. Just not glamorous at all. — Shane Carruth

Situation is. The flight engineer points to the empty fuel gauge, and makes a throat-cutting gesture with his finger.* But he says nothing. Nor does anyone else for the next five minutes. There's radio chatter and routine business, and then the flight engineer cries — Malcolm Gladwell

People have always said that I could have been a highly successful pop artist, if only that were my intention. It never was. My original intention was to be a kind of behind-the-scenes participant in music, to just be a record producer and engineer. And I made a record for myself just so I could have an outlet for my musical ideas. — Todd Rundgren

Racists are everywhere, but historically speaking the real danger came from Progressives that desired the power of the state to engineer society upon a racial lines. — A.E. Samaan

What an advantage that knowledge can be stored in books! The knowledge lies there like hermetically sealed provisions waiting for the day when you may need a meal. Surely what the Collector was doing as he pored over his military manuals, was proving the superiority of the European way of doing things, of European culture itself. This was a culture so flexible that whatever he needed was there in a book at his elbow. An ordinary sort of man, he could, with the help of an oil-lamp, turn himself into a great military engineer, a bishop, an explorer or a General overnight, if the fancy took him. — J.G. Farrell

But for goodness sake, Frank - forget you're an engineer, and simply enjoy the view. — Arthur C. Clarke

My parents were born and brought up in New York City. My father was trained as an electrical engineer, and my mother was an elementary school teacher. They were the children of Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States from England and Lithuania in the late 1800s. — David Lee

It was the engineer who determined what problems to investigate, designed the experiments, and defined the assignments for the mathematicians. — Margot Lee Shetterly

I hate normal studios, because you have to say "hi" to the person at the front desk. And then you go into the studio, and there's a second engineer in there that you don't know, and then you're stuck in a glass box with someone talking to you through a walkie-talkie. — Marilyn Manson

If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for? — Octavia E. Butler

And on the moon there is surely water ... And up there, if water exists, and air, then so does life.
A life perhaps different from ours. Perhaps that water has the flavor of (let us say) glycyrrhizin, or cardamon, or even of pepper. If there are infinite worlds, this proves the infinite ingenuity of the Engineer of our Universe, but then there is no limit to this Poet. He can have created inhabited worlds everywhere, but inhabited by ever-different creatures. Perhaps the inhabitants of the sun are sunnier, brighter, and more illuminated than are the inhabitants of the earth, who are heavy with matter, and the inhabitants of the moon lie somewhere in between. On the sun live beings who are all Form, or all Act, if you prefer, while on the earth beings are made of mere Potentials that evolve, and on the moon they are in medio fluctuantes, lunatics, so to speak ... — Umberto Eco

When you write, produce, engineer and mix everything yourself, it tends to take a long time to do anything. And when you're a perfectionist little monster, it makes it even harder. But it's a blast and I wouldn't trade the opportunity for all the ice cream sandwiches in the universe. — Adam Young

IT engineer is not a profession but a different species — Subhasis Das

Thousands of engineers can design bridges, calculate strains and stresses, and draw up specifications for machines, but the great engineer is the man who can tell whether the bridge or the machine should be built at all, where it should be built, and when. — Eugene Grace

As the son of a racing car designer and mechanical engineer, I was exposed to motorsports from day one. — Charlie Kimball

To the furniture worker's child in North Carolina who wants to become a doctor or a scientist, an engineer or an entrepreneur, a diplomat or even a president
that's the future we hope for. That's the vision we share. That's where we need to go
forward — Barack Obama

After I changed the string we picked up right where we left off - and punched back in at the same time. I don't know if this has ever been done before. The engineer sort of looked at us weird, but we got it on the first take. — Stevie Ray Vaughan

Whether you're a farmer, builder or engineer, the opportunities are equal: Just add a little innovation. — Strive Masiyiwa

Failure is Central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. — Henry Petroski

I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society. — George Saunders

For an optimist the glass is half full, for a pessimist it's half empty.And for an Engineer it is twice
bigger than necessary. — Sudeep Nagarkar

At the most basic level, prioritizing design also represents a practical consideration. It's far easier to design first and engineer later. — Ryan Holmes

Because we can engineer genetics, because we can telecast real lives-of course we must, right? But are these good things to do? The irony is, the people who will finally answer that question will be the very ones produced by the process. — Roger Ebert

I like to take people you wouldn't really think people would write novels about: an aqueduct engineer, a code-breaker, a hedge-fund manager. It's in those sorts of lives that I find more fascination than in a CIA operative or a Marine or something like that. — Robert Harris

She tilts the computer screen toward Drew "A boy," she says. "Luke." ...
"Luke," Drew repeats. "Bible or Star Wars?"
"Star Wars," Vanessa says, thinking of Teri's engineer husband. — Meg Donohue

Some write. Others Code. I art...!! — Anonymous

As a software engineer, how do you feel if your code was running in the production environment being used by millions of customers 30 minutes after you commit it to source control? — Paul Swartout

Aldus Barnes, a structural engineer by training and member of the Advanced Geometry Unit (AGU) at Arup, has formed many successful collaborations and earned a prominent place for himself in architecture by adopting the language and skills of architects. "Talk in terms of texture and density, instead of torsion and shear. That way they don't think you are just another nerd," Barnes advises the young members of his team. — Yanni Alexander Loukissas

I never claimed to be a computer engineer, but I did train as an industrial designer, and I am a consumer marketer, and I am very comfortable dealing with complex businesses and complexity in general and simplifying it - basically a systems designer. — John Sculley

Dealing with people is probably the biggest problem you face, especially if you are in business. Yes, and that is also true if you are a housewife, architect or engineer. — Dale Carnegie

As an engineer, I understood that the natural world operated according to fixed laws. Through my studies, I came to realize that there were, likewise, laws that govern human wellbeing. It seemed to me that these laws are fundamental not only to the wellbeing of societies, but also to the miniature societies of organizations. Indeed, that is what we found when we began to apply these principles systematically at Koch Industries. Through our observation of how they could create prosperity in an organization, I began to systematize my beliefs into Market-Based Management. — Charles Koch

Jobs had not tempered his way of dealing with employees. "He applied charm or public humiliation in a way that in most cases proved to be pretty effective," Tribble recalled. But sometimes it wasn't. One engineer, David Paulsen, put in ninety-hour weeks for the first ten months at NeXT. He quit when "Steve walked in one Friday afternoon and told us how unimpressed he was with what we were doing." When Business Week asked him why he treated employees so harshly, Jobs said it made the company better. "Part of my responsibility is to be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected." But he still had his spirit and charisma. There were plenty of field trips, visits by akido masters, and off-site retreats. — Walter Isaacson

First you learn the value of abstraction, then you learn the cost of abstraction, then you're ready to engineer. — Kent Beck

Except for when I was very little and thought that being an "engineer" meant he drove a train. Then I imagined him in the seat of an engine car the color of coal, a string of shiny passenger cars trailing behind. One day my father laughed and corrected me. Everything snapped into focus. It's one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you. — Nicole Krauss

If I could do anything, I'd be an engineer of some sort. I used to build robots. — Genesis Rodriguez

...erosion control in Japan is like a game of chess. The forest
engineer, after studying his eroding valley, makes his first move, locating and building
one or more check dams. He waits to see what Nature's response is. This determines the
forest engineer's next move, which may be another dam or two, an increase in the former
dam, or the construction of side retaining walls. After another pause for observation, the
next move is made and so on until erosion is checkmated." (An Agricultural Testament) — Albert Howard