Henry Petroski Quotes

Henry Petroski — American Author born on February 06, 1942,

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 and including a number of titles detailing the industrial design history of common, everyday objects, such as pencils, paper clips, and silverware. He is a frequent lecturer and a columnist for the magazines American Scientist and Prism. His most recently published book is To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure... (wikipedia)

The same aspirations to celebrate and uplift the spirit that drove the Egyptians to build the pyramids are still driving us. The things we're doing differ only in magnitude.

As engineers, we were going to be in a position to change the world - not just study it.

Science is about knowing; engineering is about doing.

We can't simply blame the engineers when things go wrong because, no matter how well they plan, things don't always go according to plan.

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