William Morris Quotes

Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure.

Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

Any design, whether it's for a ship or an airplane, must be done in anticipation of potential failures.

Federal regulations forbid delaying inspections for fracture-critical bridges like the fallen Minneapolis bridge - the kind with a lack of redundancy in design, so that a single failure in a load-bearing part can cause the entire bridge to collapse.

Everyone pushes a falling fence.

I think we have to face right in the center of the hurricane, if you will, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s foibles and faults. I think that we do no good to ourselves and do no honor to him by pretending that he did not fail, that he did not wrestle greatly and, at times, surrender to his own sins and his own faults and failures.

Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

Always beware an unsigned architectural design.

I employ case studies of failure into my courses, emphasizing that they teach us much more than studies of success. It is not that success stories cannot serve as models of good design or as exemplars of creative engineering. They can do that, but they cannot teach us how close to failure they are.

I emphasize that virtually every engineering calculation is ultimately a failure calculation, because without a failure criterion against which to measure the calculated result, it is a meaningless number.

Volvo has one weakness, and that is in the interior design. They have not adapted to the Chinese people's perception of luxury when it comes to the interior design, and this has to be addressed.

I've learnt something from every failure. The products I helped design at the first two companies I worked for were utter failures. But now I know why.

Case studies of failure should be made a part of the vocabulary of every engineer so that he or she can recall or recite them when something in a new design or design process is suggestive of what went wrong in the case study.

The weakness in the company is if we fail to execute.

My father was a construction engineer, and my mother was a production engineer.

You can be discouraged by failure, or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes, make all you can. Because, remember that's where you'll find success - on the far side of failure.

Well, back to the old drawing board.

Even if you do a great performance, if you have a weak link in the film, that's all anyone remembers.

Whether it is a big ship or small ship, the same size hole placed correctly in the hull can sink it.

Failure is Central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation.

The cord breaketh at last by the weakest pull.

The thread breakes, where it is weakest.

Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily.

What is commonly overlooked in using the computer is the fact that the central goal of design is still to obviate failure, and thus it is critical to identify exactly how a structure may fail. The computer cannot do this by itself . . .

It takes sixty-five thousand errors before you are qualified to make a rocket.