Large Projects Quotes

Can we understand - just for the record, we do need the government for a lot of big ticket items.

Historically, the British have always been rather wary of grand engineering projects - perhaps understandably, given that many of them have been delivered late and over budget.

Look how long it took to build the Freedom Tower, and we wanted that. It took 15 years.

If transport, housing and Olympic projects do not work, I will crawl away under a stone.

It's hard to do large, expensive projects without some sort of hierarchical structure where somebody can tell you - maybe softly, but at least tell you - what to do, or you have some supervision over you. Physicists like to be completely independent of each other. So that's a constant struggle. And it's a place that sometimes we get in trouble.

Companies come to us because they think we can quickly turn around things in 3 or 5 months and that's really our sweet spot. When you're a large company, you need projects that are several hundred million worth.

I worked on a number of projects that were used by millions of people and that also served as inspiration to what we now call "crowd-sourcing."

You don't build a new power plant in the United States overnight. It takes years to build.

There is something in the heart of every politician that loves a dam, or a harbor, or a bridge or a military installation.

Private enterprise in the history of civilization has never led large, expensive, dangerous projects with unknown risks. That has never happened because when you combine all these factors, you cannot create a capital market valuation of that activity.

Keep the team as small as possible. Having been on several of these mega-projects, they seem to grow magically. People are attracted to the project like moths to a flame.

Big teams are absolutely vital if you want to achieve certain results when you're working on larger scales, both in terms of physical size and productive quantities.

The problem for large scientific projects is to do something that is being done for the first time, balanced against cost, schedule. and promises to the government. That is a hard balancing act.

Drafting is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge.The closer you get to the end, the more you start to worry about the beginning.

In the charitable world, I find myself giving to large projects that I think can make a large-scale impact.

When you go from building T-shirts to software for a presidential campaign used by a cast of millions, it's pretty easy to think, 'OK, we can build something pretty big.'

I have built already seven very large railway stations: one in Italy; two in Belgium; and in France, and in Switzerland, in Portugal, and also in the United States. And what happens is that stations are not things that come from one day to another, it takes many years.