For your enjoyment, taken from some great websites, many of which are now, broken links.
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“Mach 2 travel feels no different.” a passenger commented on an early Concorde flight. “Yes,” Sir George (an engineer )replied. “That was the difficult bit.”
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Phases of a Project:
1 – Exultation
2 – Disenchantment
3 – Search for the Guilty
4 – Punishment of the Innocent
5 – Praise for the Uninvolved -
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
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The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.
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Engineering … to define rudely but not inaptly, is the art of doing that well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion.
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One has to watch out for engineers - they begin with the sewing machine and end up with the atomic bomb.
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It takes an engineer to undertake the training of an engineer and not, as often happens, a theoretical engineer who is clever on a blackboard with mathematical formulae but useless as far as production is concerned.
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The history of engineering is really the history of breakages, and of learning from those breakages. I was taught at college ‘the engineer learns most on the scrapheap’.
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An engineer is someone who is good with figures, but doesn’t have the personality of an accountant.
- An Arts graduate’s view of engineers
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Architects and engineers are among the most fortunate of men since they build their own monuments with public consent, public approval and often public money.
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An engineer is someone who washes his hands before going to the toilet
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A theory may be so rich in descriptive possibilities that it can be made to fit any data.
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Boring ( adj. ) - see: Civil Engineers.
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Engineering problems are under-defined, there are many solutions, good, bad and indifferent. The art is to arrive at a good solution. This is a creative activity, involving imagination, intuition and deliberate choice.
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Engineering refers to the practice of organizing the design and construction [and, I would add operation] of any artifice which transforms the physical world around us to meet some recognized need.
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Engineers … are not mere technicians and should not approve or lend their name to any project that does not promise to be beneficent to man and the advancement of civilization
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…(that) any general system of conveying passengers would … go at a velocity exceeding ten miles an hour, or thereabouts, is extremely improbable.
- Railway engineer Thomas Tredgold, 1835
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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
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Engineering is the art of modelling materials we do not wholly understand, into shapes we cannot precisely analyze so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess, in such a way that the public has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance.