Great Engineers Quotes & Sayings

To guys like Mark, time was another weapon of the establishment, like alphabetical order. The great engineers, hackers - they didn't function under the same time constraints as everyone else. — Ben Mezrich

When we say that the ancestors of the Blacks, who today live mainly in Black Africa, were the first to invent mathematics, astronomy, the calendar, sciences in general, arts, religion, agriculture, social organization, medicine, writing, technique, architecture; that they were the first to erect buildings out of 6 million tons of stone (the Great Pyramid) as architects and engineers - not simply as unskilled laborers; that they built the immense temple of Karnak, that forest of columns with its famed hypostyle hall large enough to hold Notre-Dame and its towers; that they sculpted the first colossal statues (Colossi of Memnon, etc.) - when we say all that we are merely expressing the plain unvarnished truth that no one today can refute by arguments worthy of the name. — Cheikh Anta Diop

In modern times much thought has been devoted to the methods used in constructing the Great Pyramid. Egyptologists marvel that such a task could have been accomplished before they were born, and our engineers say they would not have undertaken it with only some old copper tools and a complete lack of stainless steel machinery. It hardly seems possible that the ancient Egyptians were as smart as these experts. Still, they went right ahead and did it, and you can draw your own conclusions. The fact is that building a pyramid is fairly easy, aside from the lifting. You just pile up stones in receding layers, placing one layer carefully upon another, and pretty soon you have a pyramid. You can't help it.19 And once it is up, it stays there. Why wouldn't it? In other words, it is not the nature of a pyramid to fall down, and that explains why the Great Pyramid is still standing after all these years. — Will Cuppy

We have no right to judge where we should be put, or to have preconceived notions as to what God is fitting us for. God engineers everything; wherever He puts us, our one great aim is to pour out a whole-hearted devotion to Him in that particular work. 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.' — Oswald Chambers

I want to emphasize in the great concentration which we now place upon scientists and engineers how much we still need the men and women educated in the liberal tradition, willing to take the long look, undisturbed by prejudices and slogans of the moment, who attempt to make an honest judgment on difficult events. — John F. Kennedy

I've heard people say that the trouble with the world is that we haven't enough great leaders. I think we haven't enough great followers. I have stood side by side with great thinkers - surgeons, engineers, economists; people who deserve a great following - and have heard the crowd cheer me instead. — Babe Ruth

A great many college graduates come here thinking of lawyers as social engineers arguing the great Constitutional issues. — Archibald Cox

I've got a great team of engineers behind this race car. I've got a great bunch of mechanics that make it reliable. This car is developed to go out there and be better than the Reynard, and I feel that it is. — Al Unser

The Sappers really need no tribute from me; their reward lies in the glory of their achievement. The more science intervenes in warfare, the more will be the need for engineers in field armies; in the late war there were never enough Sappers at any time. Their special tasks involved the upkeep and repair of communications; roads, bridges, railways, canals, mine sweeping. The Sappers rose to great heights in World War II and their contribution to victory was beyond all calculations. — Bernard Law Montgomery

Brands were a by-product of having great products and communicating them well to people. Power stations that generate a lot of electricity probably have a lot of steam coming out of the chimneys. That doesn't mean to say that the engineers stand around working out how to make more steam. — Hans Snook

Insull was a serious and driven young man. Born into a family of temperance crusaders, he spent his boyhood poring over books with titles like Lives of the Great Engineers and Self-Help. — Nicholas Carr

One night the month before, back on the other side of the Belgian border, Aughenbaugh had delivered a lecture on the etymology of the word war. He said that he had looked it up and it came from an ancient Indo-European root signifying confusion. That was a foxhole night, bitter cold. The 5th Panzer Army was making its last great push west. You had to hand it to those Indo-Europeans, my grandfather thought, rolling through Vellinghausen. Confusion shown on the faces of the townspeople. War confused civilians every bit as surely as it did the armies who got lost in its fogs. It confounded conquest with liberation, anger with heartache, hunger with gratitude, hatred with awe. The 53rd Combat Engineers looked pretty confused, too. They were milling around at the edge of town, contemplating the long stretch of road between and beautiful downtown Berlin, trying to figure out if they ought to mine it or clear it of mines. — Michael Chabon

The people of the heart - the painters, the poets, the musicians, the dancers, the actors - are all irrational. They create great beauty, they are great lovers, but they are absolutely unfit in a society that is arranged by the head. Your artists are thought by your society to be almost outcast, a little bit crazy, an insane type of people. Nobody wants his or her children to become musicians or painters or dancers. Everybody wants them to be doctors, engineers, scientists, because those professions pay. Painting, poetry, dance, are dangerous, risky - you may end up just a beggar on the street, playing on your flute. — Osho

When screening engineers from other companies, its smart to value engineers from great companies more than those from mediocre companies. — Ben Horowitz

Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them. — James A. Michener

The Victorians were great engineers. They engineered a [schooling] system that was so robust that it's still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists. — Sugata Mitra

I wandered past the stacks of drying wood, thinking about how many great skills the world had lost, how many things of value had passed without any of us even noticing. The old men with their chisels and handsaws would have once been the most highly paid members of their community and what had we put in their place? Financial engineers and young currency traders. — Terry Hayes

I'm just attracted to the action element of science fiction. It's great to sit in the editing room with the director and sound engineers and to create the feeling where your heart is racing and you're sitting at the edge of your seat and you find yourself holding your breath. — Gale Anne Hurd

is to read things that are not yet on the page. Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There's something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that's not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor. People pay us to integrate things for them, because they don't have the time to think about this stuff 24/7. If you have an extreme passion for producing — Walter Isaacson

Calling China's online censorship system a 'Great Firewall' is increasingly trendy, but misleading. All walls, being the creation of engineers, can be breached with the right tools. — Evgeny Morozov

A team of Japanese engineers had recently tried to build a 35-feet-high replica of the Great Pyramid (rather smaller than the original, which was 481 feet 5 inches in height). The team started off by limiting itself strictly to techniques proved by archaeology to have been in use during the Fourth Dynasty. However, construction of the replica under these limitations turned out to be impossible and, in due course, modern earth-moving, quarrying and lifting machines were brought to the site. Still no worthwhile progress was made. Ultimately, with some embarrassment, the project had to be abandoned. — Graham Hancock

The company's most effective marketing tactic (besides making a great product) would never have been conceived or attempted by a pure marketing team. Instead, the engineers coded a set of tools that made it possible for every member to seamlessly cross-post his or her Airbnb listing on craigslist (because craigslist does not technically "allow" this, it was a fairly ingenious work-around). As a result, Airbnb - a tiny site - suddenly had free distribution on one of the most popular websites in the world. — Ryan Holiday

You will," said Vorkosigan wearily, "sit in that fortified palace that half the engineers are going to be tied up constructing, and party in it, and let your men do your dying for you, until you've bought your ground by the sheer weight of the corpses piled on it, because that's the kind of soldiering your mentor has taught you. And then send bulletins home about your great victory. Maybe you can have the casualty lists declared top secret." "Aral, careful," warned Vorhalas, shocked. — Lois McMaster Bujold

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they're the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company. — Walter Isaacson

Great numbers of children will be born who understand electronics and atomic power as well as other forms of energy. They will grow into scientists and engineers of a new age which has the power to destroy civilization unless we learn to live by spiritual laws. — Edgar Cayce

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

Great engineers are a huge multiplier. — Steve Jobs

Hollywood is a special place; a place filled with creative geniuses - actors, screenwriters, directors, sound engineers, computer graphics specialists, lighting experts and so on. Working together, great art happens. But in the end, all artists depend on diverse audiences who can enjoy, be inspired by and support their work. — Ryan Kavanaugh

To Monsieur Eiffel the Engineer, the brave builder of so gigantic and original a specimen of modern Engineering from one who has the greatest respect and admiration for all Engineers including the Great Engineer the Bon Dieu. — Thomas A. Edison

I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. — Steve Jobs

The Greeks were so committed to ideas as supernatural forces that they created an entire group of goddesses (not one but nine) to represent creative power; the opening lines of both The Iliad and The Odyssey begin with calls to them. These nine goddesses, or muses, were the recipients of prayers from writers, engineers, and musicians. Even the great minds of the time, like Socrates and Plato, built shrines and visited temples dedicated to their particular muse (or muses, for those who hedged their bets). Right now, under our very secular noses, we honor these beliefs in our language, as the etymology of words like museum ("place of the muses") and music ("art of the muses") come from the Greek heritage of ideas as superhuman forces. — Scott Berkun

Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There's something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that's not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great art science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor. — Walter Isaacson

I was very lucky because hanging out at a golf course was much better than being on the streets. Golf taught me a great deal. I grew up surrounded by people who were professionals - lawyers, doctors, engineers. Around them, I learned how to behave, speak, eat, dress. I had nothing at home. The club was my home. — Angel Cabrera

Gardens, not buildings
Great projects start out feeling like buildings. There are architects, materials, staff, rigid timelines, permits, engineers, a structure.
It works or it doesn't.
Build something that doesn't fall down. On time.
But in fact, great projects, like great careers and relationships that last, are gardens. They are tended, they shift, they grow. They endure over time, gaining a personality and reflecting their environment. When something dies or fades away, we prune, replant and grow again.
Perfection and polish aren't nearly as important as good light, good drainage and a passionate gardener.
By all means, build. But don't finish. Don't walk away.
Here we grow. — Seth Godin

I can go into LinkedIn and search for network engineers and come up with a list of great spear-phishing targets because they usually have administrator rights over the network. Then I go onto Twitter or Facebook and trick them into doing something, and I have privileged access. — Kevin Mitnick

We teach boys to be such men as we are. We do not teach them to aspire to be all they can. We do not give them a training as if webelieved in their noble nature. We scarce educate their bodies. We do not train the eye and the hand. We exercise their understandings to the apprehension and comparison of some facts, to a skill in numbers, in words; we aim to make accountants, attorneys, engineers; but not to make able, earnest, great- hearted men. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

we believe that in the majority of cases, it probably does make sense for you to pay a DaaS provider to host your VDI. After all, they're the experts at VDI. They have the scale to get good deals on hardware, power, and cooling. They have great relationships with Citrix, VMware, and Microsoft. They have architects and engineers who focus exclusively on VDI. — Brian Madden

Therefore, to you, and to the fifty governors, I have a request. Please, do not send me politicians. We do not have the time to do the things that must be done through that process. I need people who do real things in the real world. I need people who do not want to live in Washington. I need people who will not try to work the system. I need people who will come here at great personal sacrifice to do an important job, and then return home to their normal lives. I want engineers who know how things are built. I want physicians who know how to make sick people well. I want cops who know what it means when your civil rights are violated by a criminal. I want farmers who grow real food on real farms. I want people who know what it's like to have dirty hands, and pay a mortgage bill, and raise kids, and worry about the future. I want people who know they're working for you and not themselves. That's what I want. That's what I need. I think that's what a lot of you want, too. — Tom Clancy