Engineering & Science Notable Quote Archive #1
The number of statements uttered verbally and/or in print is uncountable. Some are more noteworthy
than others either because of sheer brilliance, good humor, or utter inanity. We all hope our
own remembered words, if any, fall into one of the first two categories rather than the third.
I do a lot of reading and find many notable quotes to use that fit the theme of RF Cafe; they
fall into all three categories. Enjoy.
- "640k ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates, 1981
- "Right now, we require more exams and licensing to drive a bus than we do to become a software engineer." - Lawrence Bernstein
- "My work is done. Why wait ?" - George Eastman (1854-1932), U.S. inventor and industrialist (his suicide note)
- "Mexico is still not with us. Mexico said that they don't believe that we have the right to go into Iraq. Believe me, if there's one rule Mexico's adamant about it's respecting another country's borders." - Jay Leno
- "In the future, airplanes will be flown by a dog and a pilot. And the dog's job will be to make sure that if the pilot tries to touch any of the buttons, the dog bites him." - Scott Adams
- "I had a fortune cookie the other day and it said: 'Outlook not so good'. I said: 'Sure, but Microsoft ships it anyway'." - Anon
- "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." - Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), on learning that his obituary had been published.
- "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olson, president/founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
- "It's not that life is so short....It's that you're dead so long." - Mark Whetu
- "The elite didn’t realize there was a revolutionary transformation going on in American society. We’re starting to see the military dividends of that in this generation, who are not afraid of the things that terrified their parents. They have sort of a pop-culture casualness about them - Ray-Ban sunglasses, big muscles, dyed hair - but a deadly seriousness. And there is not that Letterman-Seinfeld cynicism of that smart-ass urban elite." - historian Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, describing the Operation Iraqi Freedom troops and the media elite that misjudged them.
- "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." - Lord Kelvin
- "Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases." - Norm Augustine
- "Counting in octal is just like counting in decimal, if you don't use your thumbs." - Tom Lehrer
- "The secret to life is to be older than your lawn." - Franklin's grandfather (Peanuts comic strip)
- "A worm hole is a tunnel at the end of the light." - Rudolf Rab
- "What Microsoft may not realize is that the economy is not what it once was and corporations are not going to stay inside the Microsoft hamster ball forever." - John Dvorak, PC Mag
- "Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers of the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1½ tons." - Popular Mechanics, March 1949
- "It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." - Woody Allen
- "The NASA budget wouldn't run the Pentagon for two weeks, and is half of what we spend on food stamps." John Rhea, NASA
- "Why yes - a bulletproof vest." - James Rodges, murderer, on his final request before the firing squad.
- "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication." - Western Union internal memo, 1876.
- "Politics is the conduct of public affairs for private advantage." Ambrose Bierce
- "I've heard that the government wants to put a tax on the mathematically ignorant. Funny, I thought that's what the lottery was!," - Gallagher
- "Science operates according to a law of conservation of difficulty. The simplest questions have the hardest answers; to get an easier answer, you need to ask a more complicated question." George Musser, SciAm
- "This morning at 3:15, Wilbur passed away, aged 45, 1 month, and 14 days. A short life, full of consequences." - diary entry by Bishop Milton Wright (Orville and Wilbur's father), on May 30, 1912. Wilbur died of typhoid fever.
- "On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." - Charles Babbage
- As long as algebra is taught in school, there will be prayer in school. - Cokie Roberts
- "Forty is the old age of youth, Fifty is the youth of old age." - Victor Hugo
- "Our paper became a monograph. When we had completed the details, we rewrote everything so that no one could tell how we came upon our ideas or why. This is the standard in mathematics." -David Berlinski, "Black Mischief" (1988).
- "Like other occult techniques of divination, the statistical method has a private jargon deliberately contrived to obscure its methods from non-practitioners." - G. O. Ashley
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