Every Engineer Quotes by Henry Petroski

More Quotes by Henry Petroski

Henry Petroski has 41 quotes on this site. A few more worth reading:

• The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the…
• Engineers are not superhuman. They make mistakes in their assumptions, in their calculations, in their conclusions. That they make mistakes is forgivable;…
• Any design, whether its for a ship or an airplane, must be done in anticipation of potential failures.
• I emphasize that virtually every engineering calculation is ultimately a failure calculation, because without a failure criterion against which to measure the…
• All conventional wisdom has an element of truth to it, but good design requires more than an element of truth - it…
• What is commonly overlooked in using the computer is the fact that the central goal of design is still to obviate failure,…
• A failed structure provides a counterexample to a hypothesis and shows us incontrovertibly what cannot be done, while a structure that stands…
• Case studies of failure should be made a part of the vocabulary of every engineer so that he or she can recall…
• There's so much written about the Titanic, and it's hard to separate what's fact and what's fiction. My understanding is that the…
• No one wants to learn from mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from successes to go beyond the state of the art.
• The paradox is that when we model future designs on past successes, we are inviting failure down the line; when we take…
• I have always been fascinated by the way things work and how they came to take the form that they did. Writing…

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