Failure Mode Quotes

Failure is Central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation.

Once a mistake .... Twice ... A failure .

None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind; witness what's going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature.

What was wrong with train toilet doors that just locked, instead of this multiple choice system? If anything goes wrong, you'll be sitting there while the whole toilet wall slowly slides away, unveiling you like a prize on a quiz show. For 500 points, a shitting woman!

An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should never see an Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order sign, just Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience.

The opposite of ‘open’ isn’t closed. The opposite of open is broken.

It takes hundreds of nuts to hold a car together, but it takes only one of them to scatter it all over the highway.

Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.

Whether solid rockets are more or less likely to fail than liquid-fuel rockets is debatable. More serious, though, is that when they do fail, it's usually violent and spectacular.

Leading from behind doesn't work.

The real bug here is that the design of the system even permits this class of bug. It is unconscionable that someone designing a critical piece of security infrastructure would design the system in such a way that it does not fail safe.

I emphasize that virtually every engineering calculation is ultimately a failure calculation, because without a failure criterion against which to measure the calculated result, it is a meaningless number.