Mark Twain Quotes

The mers were also designed to reproduce only at long intervals, in order to maintain the natural balance of the environment in which they were placed.

You can almost say that a design error is a human error because, after all, it's we humans who do the designing.

We believe that the farm should be building 'forgiveness' into the ecosystem. What does that mean? That a more forgiving ecosystem is one that can better handle drought, flood, disease, pestilence.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.

We hope that, when the insects take over the world, they will remember with gratitude how we took them along on all our picnics.

I work very much on the principle that anything created by mankind has mischief and error hardwired into its inception.

While many alien species are harmless, others pose expensive threats to seas and fields and forests.

My first book, 'To Engineer Is Human,' was prompted by nonengineer friends asking me why so many technological accidents and failures were occurring. If engineers knew what they were doing, why did bridges and buildings fall down? It was a question that I had often asked myself, and I had no easy answer.

I wonder sometimes if manufacturers of foolproof items keep a fool or two on their payroll to test things.

To destroy a standing crop goes against the soundest instincts of human nature.

The Y2K problem is not caused by technical limitations. We simply forgot to think of the problem.

We call the fates of the Titanic and the Concordia - as well as those of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia - 'accidents.' Foreseeing such undesirable events is what engineers are expected to do. However, design trade-offs leave technological systems open to failings once predicted, but later forgotten.

The mortal enemies of man are not his fellows of another continent or race; they are the aspects of the physical world which limit or challenge his control, the disease germs that attack him and his domesticated plants and animals, and the insects that carry many of these germs as well as working notable direct injury. This is not the age of man, however great his superiority in size and intelligence; it is literally the age of insects.

If any one open his ditches to water his crop, but is careless, and the water flood the field of his neighbor, then he shall pay his neighbor corn for his loss

I say this as an engineer: We are profoundly bad at asking ourselves how the things we build could be misused.

Harvesting the biosphere is still the most fundamental human activity. Without that, everybody's dead, really. We could do quite well without microchips, or the business site of 'Atlantic Monthly,' the gated communities, Guccis, and high-growth GDP. But we cannot do without harvesting the crops and cutting down the wood.

The final principle of natural farming is NO PESTICIDES. Nature is in perfect balance when left alone.

Even the blackest of them all, the crow, Renders good service as your man-at-arms, Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail. And crying havoc on the slug and snail.

Innocence lost is not easily regained. The designer simply cannot predict the problems people will have, the misinterpretations that will arise, and the errors that will get made.

Since I turned the fields back to their natural state, I can't say I've had any really difficult problems with insects or disease.

Evolution is a mistake. Humans are a mistake. We've destroyed our planet.

If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.

Let all who build beware The load, the shock, the pressure Material can bear. So, when the buckled girder Lets down the grinding span, The blame of loss, or murder, Is laid upon the man. Not on the Stuff - the Man!

Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines. Only such people will so contrive and control those machines that their products are an enhancement of biological needs, and not a denial of them.