Civil Engineering Quotes

When engineers and quantity surveyors discuss aesthetics and architects study what cranes do we are on the right road. ~ Ove Arup

As I've looked into the eyes of street children in Afghanistan desperate for a future other than terrorism, or children in Rwanda hungry for something greater than genocide, I've reached one big conclusion: we belong to one another. And children across the Earth deserve the same hopes and opportunities we give our children here."-->Bernard Amadei, civil engineering professor at the University of Colorado and founder of Engineers Without Borders ~ Bernard Amadei

The funnel-shaped devices are tremie tubes, which are apparently being used to avoid having the wet concrete free fall into the forms where the 4-cubic-yard buckets could not fit to pour directly. ~ Ray Bottenberg

This is shitty to say, but there's not much pathos involved in a case like that. Think about it: Little So-and-so the Fourth drowns himself Tuesday night after receiving his midterm grades in the school of civil engineering. The body goes back to Westchester, and a lounge in the library or a nature path gets named after him, and a bunch of blue-blood kids remember him fondly. Sorry. There's about one story a year like that. Poor Billy Fuckup, Jr., in his Gap khakis, the pressure of going to classes all day really got to him. If I were a better person, I would have felt badly having seen things like that. ~ Cara Hoffman

George Washington was quite a farmer. He was a farmer, Civil Engineer and gentleman. He made enough at civil engineering to indulge in both the other luxuries. ~ Will Rogers

Engineering problems are under-defined, there are many solutions, good, bad and indifferent. The art is to arrive at a good solution. This is a creative activity, involving imagination, intuition and deliberate choice. ~ Ove Arup

I did graduate with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering in 1948. ~ Daniel J. Evans

Those statues were exquisitely carved, without exception; that was what the Egyptians were really good at, along with organized religion and civil engineering. ~ Jonathan Stroud

Go for civil engineering, because civil engineering is the branch of engineering which teaches you the most about managing people. Managing people is a skill which is very, very useful and applies almost regardless of what you do. ~ John Harvey-Jones

Crossrail is a prime example of infrastructure. It is a rather deadly word, but I think it is exciting stuff, the civil engineering which makes Britain tick - the bridges, tunnels, power and water networks, which bind us together. ~ Evan Davis

My dad wanted me to be a professional person, which I was - I was a civil engineer. I graduated from civil engineering at USC in California. I became an engineer, and I helped design the roads for the L.A. County Roads Department. And I did that for about one and a half years in a sense to please my parents - to be a 'respectable' person. ~ James Hong

[A] pile driver was improvised by mounting a large steam donkey engine, a steam hammer, and a timber tower on a barge. ~ Ray Bottenberg

To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort, and hope. ~ Herbert Hoover

It is contrary to the usual practice of professional men to give their opinions upon each other's work unless regularly called upon in the way of their profession. ~ John Smeaton

Aeroplanes are not designed by science, but by art in spite of some pretence and humbug to the contrary. I do not mean to suggest that engineering can do without science, on the contrary, it stands on scientific foundations, but there is a big gap between scientific research and the engineering product which has to be bridged by the art of the engineer. ~ Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Normal people ... believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet. ~ Scott Adams

Civil Engineering is the art of directing the great sources of Power in Nature for the use and convenience of man; being that practical application of the most important principles of natural Philosophy which has in a considerable degree realized the anticipations of Bacon, and changed the aspect and state of affairs in the whole world. The most important object of Civil Engineering is to improve the means of production and of traffic in states, both for external and internal Trade. ~ Thomas Tredgold

In order to create a sustainable world, we need to:
1) Educate people.
2) Educate people.
3) Educate people.
For every person left uneducated about the system of this sphere, the nature will make us all pay for it. Sustainability can only start in the mind. ~ A. Togay Koralturk

The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering - that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good. ~ L. Sprague De Camp

Today when a man gets married he gets a home, a housekeeper, a cook, a cheering squad and another paycheck. When a woman marries, she gets a boarder. To define it rudely but not ineptly, engineering is the art of doing that well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion. ~ Duke Of Wellington

Never forget that the word that best describes reliable science is not consensus, but engineering. ~ Vox Day

Civil disobedience was new to Lancre, but its inhabitants had already mastered some of its more elementary manifestations, viz, the jerking of rakes and sickles in the air with simple up-and-down motions accompanied by grimaces and cries of "Gerrh!," although a few citizens, who hadn't quite grasped the idea, were waving flags and cheering. Advanced students were already eyeing the more combustible buildings inside the walls. Several sellers of hot meat pies and sausages in a bun had appeared from nowhere* and were doing a brisk trade. Pretty soon someone was going to throw something. ~ Terry Pratchett

It is alarming ... to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal Palace while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience. ~ Winston Churchill

After Frank came out, Amy would begin a performance at a gig by walking onstage, clapping and chanting, 'Class-A drugs are for mugs. Class-A drugs are for mugs …' She'd get the whole audience to join in until they'd all be clapping and chanting as she launched into her first number. Although Amy was smoking cannabis, she had always been totally against class-A drugs. Blake Fielder-Civil changed that. Amy first met him early in 2005 at the Good Mixer pub in Camden. None of Amy's friends that I've spoken to over the years can remember exactly what led to this meeting. But after that encounter she talked about him a lot. 'When am I going to meet him, darling?' I asked. Amy was evasive, which was probably, I learned later, because Blake was in a relationship. Amy knew about this, so initially you could say that Amy was 'the other woman'. And although she knew that he was seeing someone else, it was only about a month after they'd met that she had his name tattooed over her left breast. It was clear that she loved him – that they loved each other – but it was also clear that Blake had his problems. It was a stormy relationship from the start. A few weeks after they'd met, Blake told Amy that he'd finished with the other girl, and Amy, who never did anything by halves, was now fully obsessed with him. ~ Mitch Winehouse

The only wars here will be civil wars, and those are like killing your own mother. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters. ~ Margaret Atwood

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides adduces a change in language as a major factor in Athens's descent from dysfunctional democracy through demagoguery into tyranny and anarchy: people began to define things in any way they pleased, he says, and the "normally accepted meaning of words" broke down. In his account of the Catiline crisis in republican Rome, Sallust has Cato the Younger identify the misuse of language - specifically the scission of word and meaning - as the underlying cause of the threat to the state. Society, Cato says, has lost the "vera vocabula rerum," literally, the "true names of things."18 In seventeenth-century England, Thomas Hobbes lived through a civil war he believed had been caused in significant measure by a war of words about religion - spread through the pervasive pamphleteering that printing had made possible - that had fatally weakened the linguistic common ground on which an ordered state depends. ~ Mark John Thompson

It was a strange thing to be in a distant land, among things you'd never seen before, all because our people in Congress had squabbled among themselves and failed to get along and there were hotheads in the South who thought more of their Negroes and their pride than they did of their country ~ Shelby Foote

When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth," he was not merely being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant "government of the people" but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term "people" to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. Thus America's problem is not its betrayal of "government of the people," but the means by which "the people" acquired their names. This ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Well, you have to remember that until 1948, when Hubert Humphrey and others forced the Democratic Party to adopt a new policy on civil rights, the Democratic Party was the party of the old solid South. All of the racists, all of the Cottonhead Smith types and so on were Democrats, allies of Franklin Roosevelt - because of their seniority - of all the major committees of the Congress. ~ William A. Rusher

Most historians agree that Abraham Lincoln was the most important man to ever occupy the White House because he abolished slavery and kept the states united through a bloody civil war. ~ Kitty Kelley

A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought, within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The birthright of man ... is such a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft

I believe that what I've worked for - women and children, civil rights against poverty, trying to level the playing field for people to have a better chance - is what I still believe is important and what I'm trying to do today. ~ Hillary Clinton

Locale and point of focus and heroine. She leaves the great battlefields of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Bull Run and Antietam to the others and places the Civil War in the middle of Scarlett O'Hara's living room. She has the Northern cannons sounding beyond Peachtree Creek as Melanie Wilkes goes into labor, and has the city of Atlanta in flames as Scarlett is seized with an ~ Margaret Mitchell

Change flows organically from the students themselves. ~ David Edward Goldberg

I wish to see, in process of disappearing, that only thing which ever could bring this nation to civil war. ~ Abraham Lincoln

I was on the state board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union. ~ Betty Hill

When Chuck House wanted to develop the oscilloscope for HP, David Packard told him to abandon the project. Chuck went on "vacation" and came back with $2 million in orders. Packard later gave him an award inscribed with an accolade for "extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering." ~ Bob Sutton

I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don't see much of a distinction beyond that. ~ Joe Biden

Because of fear, people who have civil rights can't use them ~ Sunday Adelaja

There were three Selma-to-Montgomery marches in March 1965, and Rosa Parks had missed the first one. Parks, whose act of civil disobedience sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, moved to Detroit two years later for safety reasons. ~ Douglas Brinkley

Syria is already in the grips of a civil war, unfortunately enough, and Egypt is moving in that direction. We would like to see the Egyptian people avoid this fate ~ Vladimir Putin

A freedom given up is not so easily regained. ~ Rivera Sun

A second line is in effect a civil rights demonstration. Literally, demonstrating the civil right of the community to assemble in the street for peaceful purposes. Or, more simply, demonstrating the civil right of the community to exist. ~ Ned Sublette

When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman, and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing--a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of the path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place. In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees.

After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, 'Let the children come!' and they ran from the trees toward her.

Let your mothers hear you laugh,' she told them, and the woods rang. The adults looked on and could not help smiling.

Then 'Let the grown men come,' she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees.

Let your wives and your children see you dance,' she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet.

Finally she called the women to her. 'Cry,' she told them. 'For the living and the dead. Just cry.' And without covering their eyes the women let loose.

It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and ~ Toni Morrison

We must try to see the world through a black person's eyes, see hard truths and not unfairly judge those who deliver them. We need to see people - real people - not the stereotypes handed down by previous generations. ~ Mark M. Bello

Yes, he was a good man, but he was also a black man. And when you're black, being good isn't always enough."
"No, sweetheart, it isn't. A black man walks a different line, a tightrope. Sometimes that line is hard to see. That seems to be what happened here. ~ Mark M. Bello

I call'd the devil, and he came, And with wonder his form did I closely scan; He is not ugly, and is not lame, But really a handsome and charming man. A man in the prime of life is the devil, Obliging, a man of the world, and civil; A diplomatist too, well skill'd in debate, He talks quite glibly of church and state. ~ Heinrich Heine

Capitalism is not a form of government. Capitalism is a symptom of freedom. It is the result of individual rights, which include property rights. ~ A.E. Samaan

I went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the Spanish Civil War than I did about the Irish Civil War. I liked Barcelona, and then I grew to like a place in the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pillars, especially an area between the village of Flavors and the high mountains around it. ~ Colm Toibin

The Civil War was about a lot of things, but the core of it was slavery. That was the original sin. ~ John Fund

Are you kidding me? It's insane that civil rights are being denied people in this day and age. It's embarrassing, and it's heartbreaking. It goes without saying that I'm completely in support of gay marriage. In 10 years we'll be ashamed that this was an issue. ~ Chris Evans

Over the last 30 odd years, Democrats have moved to the right and the right has moved into the mental hospital. So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge fund managers, credit card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture and the pharmaceutical lobby ... That's the Democrats. And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, flat-earthers and civil war re-enactors who mostly communicate by AM radio and call themselves the Republicans and who actually worry that Obama is a socialist. Socialist? He's not even a liberal. ~ Bill Maher

I was watching TV and saw people with masks, weapons, and grenades. I thought, Is that really possible? Could we be here yet again? And go into civil war one more time? ~ Nadine Labaki

Virtually all of Africa's civil wars were started by politically marginalized or excluded groups. ~ George Ayittey