Essential Quotes for Scientists and Engineers

Springer, 2021, 239 pp. ISBN #978-3-030-63331-8

Preface

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
—Winston Churchill, 1930

For following Sir Winston’s advice taken for the epigraph, there are many quote collections available, both in print and online—see, e.g., the list of references at the end of this publication. However, I could not find a collection that would be, to my taste, reasonably comprehensive, at the same time being sufficiently refined for a typical busy member of the science/engineering community, to which I belong. This is why I dare to offer this community (including students of STEM disciplines) a modest set of less than 2,500 my personal favorites, accumulated over nearly a decade of bedtime reading.

These quotes (on quite a few topics, not just science and engineering per see) have been selected for either their importance for the community, or depth of thought, or wit—or all of the above. Any selection implies a certain bias, but this collection still includes different perspectives—in my humble view, all non-trivial —on quite a few debatable issues.

To make the consecutive reading of the quotes more engaging, the entries are not only grouped into topical sections but also thematically ordered inside each section, forming quasi-continuous narrative threads. The unavoidable twists and turns and (less frequent) breaks of the threads are marked with three-asterisk lines.

The text and the authorship of each quote have been carefully verified. If the time of its first publication (sometimes posthumous) could be established, it is given after the author’s name; if not, some idea of its timing may be obtained from the years of the author’s life, listed in the Author Index, and also from my footnote comments. Since most of these comments address the authorship and timing issues, they may be safely ignored by the reader interested only in the quote contents.

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