"Failures are much more dramatic than successes, and……" — Henry Petroski
"Failures are much more dramatic than successes, and people like drama. I think this is why automobile races draw such crowds. People expect spectacular crashes, which we tend to find more interesting than cars just racing around the track. The same is true of bridges, buildings, or any structure or machine."
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Henry Petroski
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41 Quotes by Henry Petroski
Henry Petroski has 41 quotes on this site.
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The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made…
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Engineers are not superhuman. They make mistakes in their assumptions, in their calculations, in their conclusions. That they make mistakes…
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Any design, whether its for a ship or an airplane, must be done in anticipation of potential failures.
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I emphasize that virtually every engineering calculation is ultimately a failure calculation, because without a failure criterion against which to…
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All conventional wisdom has an element of truth to it, but good design requires more than an element of truth…
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What is commonly overlooked in using the computer is the fact that the central goal of design is still to…
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A failed structure provides a counterexample to a hypothesis and shows us incontrovertibly what cannot be done, while a structure…
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Case studies of failure should be made a part of the vocabulary of every engineer so that he or she…
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There's so much written about the Titanic, and it's hard to separate what's fact and what's fiction. My understanding is…
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No one wants to learn from mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from successes to go beyond the state of…
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The paradox is that when we model future designs on past successes, we are inviting failure down the line; when…
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I have always been fascinated by the way things work and how they came to take the form that they…
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