quotes

i started gathering these quotes during my freshman year, drawing inspiration from the collection of engineering quotes at nyu abu dhabi’s engineering design studio. i observed how these phrases, philosophies, and concepts consistently resonate throughout the field of engineering, eloquently describing the functioning world around us in captivating ways.

if you’ve got time to spare, they’re worth taking a look at:

• “The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.”

  — Freeman Dyson

• “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

  — Richard P. Feynman

• “I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one.”

  — Bill Gates

• “We are the masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.”

  — Churchill

• “An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.”

  — Niels Bohr

• “I didn’t make a decision to pursue astronomy. Rather, it just grabbed me, and I had no thought of escaping.”

  — Carl Sagan

• “Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”

  — Einstein

• “Now, most people hate to admit they’re wrong, but it didn’t bother Bill one bit. All he cared about was what was right, not who was right. That’s what makes Bill very, very dangerous.”

  — Larry Ellison on Bill Gates

• “A fundamental theory should have no free parameters.”

  — Thomas Van Riet

• “Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.”

  — first paragraph of David Goldstein’s States of Matter

• “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work.”

  — John Gall

• “He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night.”

  — Divorce complaint of Richard Feynman’s Second Wife

• “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

  — Max Planck

• “As all these results were obtained, not by any heroic method, but by patient and detailed reasoning, I began to think it probable that philosophy had erred in adopting heroic remedies for intellectual difficulties, and that solutions were to be found merely by greater care and accuracy. This view I have come to hold more and more strongly as time went on, and it has led me to doubt whether philosophy, as a study distinct from science and possessed of a method of its own, is anything more than an unfortunate legacy from theology.”

  — Bertrand Russell

• “Never offer what you’d hate someone for accepting.”

  — Tara Ploughman

• “Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

  — Alan Kay

• “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp…else, what’s the heavens for?”

  — Richard Nakka

• “Good explanation doesn’t start up in our head but rather rests on a body of vivid experience.”

  — Unknown

• “Design Becomes Discovery. Architecture becomes Adaptation.”

  — BIG

• “As grounds for conflict become more fertile, a calculus of gains and losses takes shape with the zero-sum game emerging almost inevitably.”

  — Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy

• “Don’t present presumption as fact.”

  — Matt Karau

• “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat.”

  — Eric Schmidt

• “Et tu, Brute?”

  — Julius Caesar

• “Anything that can go wrong will.”

  — Murphy’s Law

• “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”

  — H. L. Mencken

• “Investment in reliability will increase until it exceeds the probable cost of errors, or until someone insists on getting some useful work done.”

  — Glib’s Fourth Law of Unreliability

• “Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…”

  — Carl Sagan

• “There is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.”

  — John F. Kennedy

• “From indoctrination’s foul rope
  Suspend all reason, all hope
  Until with swollen tongue
  Morality herself is hung.”

  — Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy

• “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”

  — Paul Kedrosky

• “The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite…”

  — Georg Cantor

• “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

  — Aristotle

• “Obsessed is just a word the lazy use to describe the dedicated.”

  — Russell Warren

• “Small differences in initial state yield widely different outcomes.”

  — Chaos Theory

• “The question isn’t who is going to let me, it’s who is going to stop me.”

  — Ayn Rand

• “To think is to forget differences, to generalize, to abstract.”

  — Jorge Luis Borges