Eric Ashby Quotes

What is innovation if not our ticket to every business interest in the world? It's the ticket to solving the world's problems - the energy problems, the pollution problems, the global warming problems. If it isn't for science and engineering, how will we compete in the new world?

Who brings tomorrow into the present if not the scientists, technicians and engineers?

This not the age of pamphleteers. It is the age of engineers. The spark-gap is mightier than the pen. Democracy will not be salvaged by men who talk fluently, debate forcefully, and quote aptly.

To make any future that we dreamt up real requires creative scientists, engineers, and technologists to make it happen. If people are not within your midst who dream about tomorrow - with the capacity to bring tomorrow into the present - then the country might as well just recede back into the cave because that's where we're headed.

I'm very pro-science and pro-technology; I believe that these have been key drivers of progress in the world in the last centuries.

The scientist and engineers who are building the future need the poets to make sense of it.

What is now proved was once only imagined.

History has repeatedly shown that when a new method or material becomes available, new uses for it arise.

Engineering or technology is all about using the power of science to make life better for people, to reduce cost, to improve comfort, to improve productivity, etc.

Technology... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

It was a case of the technology catching up with the problem.

Science is inextricably linked to our economy. It has been for the last 50 years and it will be for the next 50 years.

In a world being transformed by technology, good science is vital to good diplomacy.

The public hears that we're Number 1 in science and they want to know why that fact isn't making their lives better.

We discuss the potential drawbacks of genetic testing or genetic modification of crops. We do not discuss the suffering and environmental damage that will be caused by holding back innovation…. The debate is unbalanced here because it is complacent about the imperfect present.

At the present time, when railways, the telegraph, the telephone, to say nothing of other inventions and improvements of importance, have simplified communication between all lands and nations to the last degree, there is scarcely any reason to fear either distance or the estrangement of the several parts of a single whole. Practically distance is almost nonexistent. What to our ancestors appeared simply near at hand now seems to lie immediately before our eyes

So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God.

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations

Modern civilization depends on science …

We cannot idealize technology. Technology is only and always the reflection of our own imagination, and its uses must be conditioned by our own values.

I consider myself fundamentally more of an environmentalist than many of the environmental groups. We have to come up with new sources of food, new sources of water, new sources of energy. Trying to ignore leading-edge science and technology as a means of getting there is an ostrich approach of burying your head in the sand.

Engineers and entrepreneurs are fundamentally dissatisfied with the way the world is and want to make it better. There are so many things you could do with technology if you can match it up with real problems.

Science, engineering, and technology discovers and invents new ways of doing things - but it doesn't dictate how we should do them.

I am keen to serve one-sixth of the world's population where the miracles of science and technology would multiply manifold for betterment of mankind.