The Engineer Quotes

#1. I've been a software engineer, a novelist, a journalist, and a manager - and managing developers is easily the trickiest thing I've ever done.

Jon Evans

#2. The "Powers That Be" are not smart enough to engineer Armageddon, but they may yet be stupid enough. If governments are involved in covering up the knowledge of aliens, then they are doing a much better job of it than they seem to do at anything else.

Stephen Hawking

#3. Chris is the engineer down at the studio where we do these things. And he's just such an integral part and he has such a marvelous ear. Also it turns out, we didn't know, but he's a pretty good fiddle player.

Guy Clark

#4. Keep in mind that if you take a tour through a hospital and look at every machine with on and off switch that is brought into the service of diagnosing the human condition, that machine is based on principles of physics discovered by a physicist in a machine designed by an engineer.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#5. You should hire the best engineer you can find, regardless of her coding preference, because if she's the best she can down enough Java to C how to make the Python Go.

Eric Schmidt

#6. My parents, and especially my mother, encouraged by the director of the local school which I was attending, wanted in spite of everything to send me to a National School of Arts and Crafts so that I could later become an engineer.

Leon Jouhaux

#7. Engineering stimulates the mind. Kids get bored easily. They have got to get out and get their hands dirty: make things, dismantle things, fix things. When the schools can offer that, you'll have an engineer for life.

Bruce Dickinson

#8. While we can't always engineer our own happy endings, we can learn how to be more happy than not with the cards we've been dealt.

Adam Silvera

#9. 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

#10. Early in my career, I was involved with engineer-led projects, where designers came in late in the game and were expected to put lipstick on an existing code base. This almost never works.

Ryan Holmes

#11. My doodles and sketches are not the work of an academic engineer. They represent many years of design study in attempts to produce the best value for money in the field of small car design.

Alec Issigonis

#12. I am so often the architect of my own pain and the engineer of my own failures.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#13. For a long time I thought I should be a civil engineer. That seemed to be the only thing worth doing, and I chose the wrong subjects at A-level. I read all the sciences to start with, and then had to admit, 'This isn't what I want to do' and changed course.

Ian Hislop

#14. 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

#15. I was a kind of a one-man army. I could solder circuits together, I could turn out things on the lathe, I could work with rockets and balloons. I'm a kind of a hybrid between an engineer and a physicist and astronomer.

James Van Allen

#16. I was a sound engineer, and all of these gurus and shamans would come, and I would record the workshops they were teaching. And I took part in a shamanic journeying workshop, and this woman leading the workshop had brought Ayahuasca, which is a Peruvian hallucinogen and contains DMT.

Larkin Grimm

#17. 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

#18. Here, economists will recognize the principle of price differentiation formulated by the engineer-economist Jules Dupuit in 1849: "To set a price for a service, don't base it on what it costs the provider, but instead set the price according to the importance of the service to the user."[10]

Bernard Girard

#19. So I just got on the phone and the engineer just patched me in and I did reports. I'd get a community leader and bring him to the phone, call up the station and do an interview over the phone with the guy.

Ed Bradley

#20. 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

#21. Science is the study of what Is, Engineering builds what Will Be. The scientist merely explores that which exists, while the engineer creates what has never existed before.

Theodore Von Karman

#22. I have never left the company. I keep a tiny residual salary to this day because that's where my loyalty should be forever. I want to be an "employee" on the company data base. I won't engineer, I'd rather be basically retired, due to my family. (talking about his relationship with Apple Inc)

Steve Wozniak

#23. Don't make me out to be an artist. I am an engineer. I am after the facts, only the facts.

Harold Eugene Edgerton

#24. The ancient joy of helping the tribe to survive is constantly rekindled in the engineer's heart.

Samuel Florman

#25. When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don't throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.

Corrie Ten Boom

#26. Here I am, a not over-good business man, a second-rate engineer. I can make poor mechanical drawings. I play the piano after a fashion. In fact, I am one of those proverbial Jack-of-all-trades who are usually failures. Why I am not, I can't tell you.

Charles M. Schwab

#27. The GPS still has return coordinates programmed, although when I crank over the engine, I get the "reprogramming route" message. I hate the tone of these things-it manages to be mechanical yet condescending at the same time. All systems have it. Some frustrated engineer's idea of a joke, I suppose.

Jeanne C. Stein

#28. My training as an engineer has enabled me to design the stuff, but the reason I do it is not to make music but for the opportunity to work with musicians.

Robert Moog

#29. Everything I've ever done is out. I don't have boxes of unreleased stuff. There's nothing in the files. I can never keep anything unless I don't like the sound of it or it didn't work. If I can sing it to an engineer, I can sing it to anyone ...

John Lennon

#30. I'm not a surgeon.' 'You don't have to be. You're an engineer. That's almost the same thing.' 'Your ignorance is frightening.

Jodi Taylor

#31. I believe destiny and hard work go hand in hand. I was studying to be an engineer when my mom and my brother sent my pictures for the Miss India contest. I didn't even know about it. If that isn't destiny, what is?

Priyanka Chopra

#32. [S]tudies show that one of the best ways to lift your mood is to engineer an easy success, such as tackling a long-delayed chore.

Gretchen Rubin

#33. The "hillbilly" girls were generating more enriched Tubealloy per run than the PhDs had...The District Engineer understood perfectly. Those girls...had been trained like soldiers. Do what you're told. Don't ask why.

Denise Kiernan

#34. Engineer possibility into greatness

Julian Pencilliah

#35. The amateur software engineer is always in search of magic.

Grady Booch

#36. 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

#37. It was expected of all good middle-class Indian people to build India and, as you know, Indians - when we say, 'build India,' it was all about being an accountant, a lawyer, an engineer. So it was this idea that professionals would build the country.

Shekhar Kapur

#38. No engineer can go upon a new work and not find something peculiar, that will demand his careful reflection, and the deliberate consideration of any advice that he may receive; and nothing so fully reveals his incapacity as a pretentious assumption of knowledge, claiming to understand everything.

John B. Jervis

#39. The worst thing in the world that can happen to you if you're an engineer that has given his life to something is for someone to rip it off and put their name to it.

Tim Cook

#40. My dad was a mechanical engineer and a drummer. We had no money, but I never felt we had no money, and that's what I remember now, having my own child. I think, 'Oh so what?' Kids don't go around the house seeing what's wrong with it.

Donna Air

#41. Oftentimes the quality of the light tells the story: the time of day, the weather, whether sun is streaming through the window. It can also help you appreciate what the actor is feeling, what the playwright wants you to feel. Any engineer can put a spot on someone.

Jules Fisher

#42. She's an engineer of oppression, and one of the best minds of Gold. And she tried to kill Sevro. Bad play.

Pierce Brown

#43. You go to a technology conference or an engineering conference, there are very few women there. At the same time it's a blessing in the fact that you do get noticed. People tend to remember you as the only woman in the room 'who said that', or the only woman in the room who was an engineer.

Padmasree Warrior

#44. [ ... ] I will go to France, to Yugoslavia, to China and continue my profession.'
'As sanitary engineer?'
'No, Monsieur. As adventurer. I will see all the peoples and all the countries in the world.

Bruce Chatwin

#45. I wanted to be a psychological engineer, but we lacked the facilities, so I did the next best thing - I went into politics. It's practically the same thing.

Isaac Asimov

#46. When I was a kid and I bought a record, I ripped that thing open, I wanted to know who was playing what, what studio it was cut at, who was the string arranger, who was the engineer.

Lenny Kravitz

#47. Most of the work performed by a development engineer results in failure.

Koichi Tanaka

#48. Politics is an art and not a science, and what is required for its mastery is not the rationality of the engineer but the wisdom and the moral strength of the statesman

Hans J. Morgenthau

#49. Lord Uthe once said I wouldn't be the one at the head of the army, storming the castle. I'd be the engineer, tunneling beneath to bring the whole thing crashing down.

Anonymous

#50. The lesson has already been learned with alcohol prohibition. We tried to engineer an alcohol-free society and ended up with huge criminal enterprises, government corruption, children lured into organized crime and random violence that took the lives of countless innocent people.

Kurt Schmoke

#51. Why should a financial engineer be paid four, four times ... to a hundred times more than the, uh ... real engineer?
A real engineer build bridges, a financial engineer build, build dreams.
And when those dream turn out to be nightmares, other people pay for it.

Andrew Sheng

#52. Forelimbs of people, porpoises, bats and horses provide the classic example of homology in most textbooks. They look different, and do different things, but are built of the same bones. No engineer, starting from scratch each time, would have built such disparate structures from the same parts.

Stephen Jay Gould

#53. [...] it would have been an affront to all good souls who had worked for a better world over the millennia not to engineer a system for preserving finer thoughts after the millennium arrived and all ideologies died and people became animals once more.

Douglas Coupland

#54. The engineer performs many public functions from which he gets only philosophical satisfactions. Most people do not know it, but he is an economic and social force.

Herbert Hoover

#55. I know you engineer types are excellent with mathematics, much better than I ever will be, but I do know the difference between a tiny pail of coins and big bucket of dollars. How can I take the pail when I am worth the bucket?

Ken Goldstein

#56. 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

#57. Perhaps we now need to engineer scarcity in our communications, in our interactions, and in the things we consume. Otherwise our lives become like a Morse code transmission that's lacking breaks - a swarm of noise blanketing the valuable data beneath.

Michael Harris

#58. A brilliant author or businesswoman or senator or software engineer is brilliant only in tiny bursts. The rest of the time, they're doing work that most any trained person could do.

Seth Godin

#59. The ancient Romans had a tradition: whenever one of their engineers constructed an arch, as the capstone was hoisted into place, the engineer assumed accountability for his work in the most profound way possible: he stood under the arch.

Michael Armstrong

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

Strive Masiyiwa

#61. The Chronic represented everything that I hated about hip-hop as a fan, but then later represented everything that I stood for as a musician and engineer.

Questlove

#62. Don't drag the engine, like an ignoramus, but bring wood and water and flame, like an engineer.

Maria Weston Chapman

#63. It infuriates me that stuff from the Internet routinely doesn't include all the credits. Because as soon as I listen to something, if I like it, I want to know, "Who's the bass player?" "Who did that?" "Who's the engineer on this?"

Brian Eno

#64. Don't go to the same studio twice, or work with the same engineer twice.

Stephen Malkmus

#65. Today every city, town, or village is affected by it. We have entered the Neon Civilization and become a plastic world.. It goes deeper than its visual manifestations, it affects moral matters; we are engaged, as astrophysicists would say, on a decaying orbit.

Raymond Loewy

#66. The word meltdown had not yet entered the reactor engineer's vocabulary - Fermi was only then inventing that specialty - but that is what Compton was risking, a small Chernobyl in the midst of a crowded city.

Richard Rhodes

#67. When this engineer, Sergeant Mukherjee, grabbed me by the arm

Max Brooks

#68. In the end it's your knowledge that will prove you as an Engineer, Even i can score better if sacrificed thinking practically..

Srinivas Shenoy

#69. Without 'The Brady Bunch,' my guess is I would have become an engineer working on new plastics or something.

Mike Lookinland

#70. Case studies of failure should be made a part of the vocabulary of every engineer so that he or she can recall or recite them when something in a new design or design process is suggestive of what went wrong in the case study.

Henry Petroski

#71. 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

#72. He didn't say "that's weird". He wouldn't have said "that's weird" if a flock of sheep had cycled past playing violins. It wasn't the sort of thing a responsible engineer said.

Terry Pratchett

#73. My father, who had previously been a civil engineer, died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918.

James Rainwater

#74. I went to military college in Canada and graduated as an officer in the Navy but also as an engineer.

Marc Garneau

#75. I'm discovering that the people that wake up early are really the trendsetters. They are up giving the commands on what the whole world needs to do so the worker wakes up at 8am but the dreamer, the innovator, the creator, the engineer is up at 3 or 4 in the morning making it happen.

Eric Thomas

#76. Indeed, an engineer designing a structure is not unlike an artist painting one. Both start with nothing but talent, experience, and inspiration. The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank as the newly stretched piece of canvas.

Henry Petroski

#77. One of my favorite things as an engineer is watching a band get comfortable in the studio and getting a great take. Like, they're playing the song, warming up, and then suddenly, the communication really happens and everybody's really in the song, and they nail it, and then that's the take.

J. Robbins

#78. First you learn the value of abstraction, then you learn the cost of abstraction, then you're ready to engineer.

Kent Beck

#79. 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

#80. Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is who will have to deal with it, the user or the developer (programmer or engineer).

Larry Tesler

#81. My generation's parents told their children, 'Become an accountant, a lawyer, or an engineer; that will give you a solid foothold in the middle class.' But these jobs are now being sent overseas. So in order to make it today, you have to do work that's hard to outsource, hard to automate.

Daniel H. Pink

#82. 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

#83. GNOSTICS, n. A sect of philosophers who tried to engineer a fusion between the early Christians and the Platonists. The former would not go into the caucus and the combination failed, greatly to the chagrin of the fusion managers.

Ambrose Bierce

#84. No weapons designer or engineer would build something with such an arbitrary weakness," he said. "The Disrupter is more like something a videogame developer would come up with, to create a big challenge at the end of a level - a boss that requires a huge sacrifice to destroy.

Ernest Cline

#85. My brother is an electrical engineer and went to computer science grad school at Stanford, and he'd tell me stories about the happy hours he'd organize.

Alec Berg

#86. Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he'll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison.

Neal Stephenson

#87. Natural selection is not a master engineer, but a tinkerer. It doesn't produce the absolute perfection achievable by a designer starting from scratch, but merely the best it can do with what is has to work with.

Jerry A. Coyne

#88. 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

#89. The plan is to engineer events, real and staged, that will create enormous fear in the countdown years to 2012. This includes a plan to start a third world war either by stimulating the Muslim world into a "holy war" against the West or by using the Chinese to cause global conflict. Maybe both.

David Icke

#90. My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers. Every two weeks, he'd take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms - 'Have you read this? And this? And this?'

Janet Fitch

#91. But for goodness sake, Frank - forget you're an engineer, and simply enjoy the view.

Arthur C. Clarke

#92. I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can't help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That's why we've got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.

Kurt Vonnegut

#93. It always offended me when I was in the studio and the engineer or the assumed producer for the session would start bossing the band around. That always seemed like a horrible insult to me.

Steve Albini

#94. The only thing I knew was that I would give myself permission to imagine anything, and reverse engineer my way from there.

Natasha Tsakos

#95. I wanted to be a genetic engineer. That was my goal in college. I wanted to figure out what the codon sequence was that causes replication in a cardio myopathic virus. That was my goal.

Ashton Kutcher

#96. I became a welder. I was actually becoming an Engineer and I joined the wrong queue. And so I became a welder, without knowing what a welder was.

Billy Connolly

#97. I wanted to become an engineer, or get a masters in business. But I had the opportunity to do films when I was about 25 and it was a great way to express myself.

Dolph Lundgren

#98. The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#99. If you, or any public-spirited programmer, wanted to figure out what the software on your machine is really doing, tough luck. It's illegal to reverse engineer the source code of commercial software to find out how it works.

Clive Thompson

#100. In the early days it was fun to fly. You could soar over rooftops and trees, or drop down to meet a passing train and wave at the engineer. The whole sky belonged to you. now there are so many regulations. The sky is crowded. All the fun is gone.

Katherine Stinson