"Many [American] youth in general have no interest in becoming engineers, simply because the industry markets its message poorly." - Wilbert Q. Murdock, entrepreneur

"Most of the projects we work on start out with people saying, 'You can't do that.' What they really mean is, 'We haven't done that before.'" - Dean Kamen, Segway inventor

"Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia." - Charles Schultz, creator of Peanuts

“Qualcomm may not have a license to print money, but it has a license to collect it by phone.” - Erik Sherman, Reed Electronics

"Technology is anything that doesn't quite work yet" - Danny Hillis, CTO of Applied Minds

"Experience is what you gain immediately after it was needed." - Joe Wagner, AMA's "The Engine Shop"

"We are training our engineers to be managers ,while the rest of the world is training them to be doers." - Bob Lutz, General Motors

"Geeks are early adopters. They're willing to give up whatever they're doing to find a better thing to do." - David Allen, author of "Getting Things Done"

"Take a half-dozen Nobel laureates in medicine in the 1980s: The work that won them the prize is now done routinely in high school biology labs." - Dean Kamen of DEKA R&D Corp.

"Any competent farmer knows it is wasteful to use his $100k tractor to pick up groceries, so why cannot highly educated management realize that it is equally wasteful to have $100k engineers do work that any high school graduate could do equally well?" - Thomas Bradley, EET contributor

"As technology makes things more idiot-proof, God seems to be creating more capable idiots." - Dave Brown, AMA President

"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility." - Lee DeForest, American inventor (1873-1961)

"Silicon is arguably the most important and intensely studied material known to humankind." - Salvatore Coffa

"Our society places so much of the created value of a company in its patent portfolio that IP has become, in a very real sense, the family jewels." - Ron Wilson, EE Times

"The Higgs boson is a commode down which all theoretical inconsistencies are flushed." - Harvard physicist Sheldon Glashow

"All we have to do to know that fusion works is look up at the stars." - Carl Sagan, "Butthead Astronomer"

"The harsh fact is that the U.S. need for the highest quality human capital in science, mathematics, and engineering is not being met." - U.S. Commission on National Security for the 2first Century

"We're told that if you want to sell a product in China, you have to make that product in China." - EE Times guest writer

"Pain is weakness leaving the body." - U.S.M.C. saying

"We’re busier than an electron in a mistuned waveguide here." - Bob Davis, AMDS Wireless