Henry Petroski Quotes
Because every design must satisfy competing objectives, there necessarily has to be compromise among, if not the complete exclusion of, some of those objectives, in order to meet what are considered the more important of them.
Petroski, Henry. Invention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing. Harvard University Press, 1996.
He was a skeptic of efforts to reform or to create sophisticated legislation to fix complex problems. Attempts to reform the tax code is a classic example of each new reform opens new loopholes other than the ones which were closed and often more.
Henry Petroski is an American engineer specializing in failure analysis. A professor both of civil engineering and history at Duke University, he is also a prolific author. Petroski has written over a dozen books – beginning with To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (1985) and including a number of titles detailing the industrial design history of common, everyday objects, such as pencils, paper clips, toothpicks, and silverware. His first book was made into the film When Engineering Fails. He is a frequent lecturer and a columnist for the magazines American Scientist and Prism.
