All conventional wisdom has an element of truth to it, but good design requires more than an element of truth - it requires an ensemble of correct assumptions and valid calculations.

— Henry Petroski

Any design, whether it's for a ship or an airplane, must be done in anticipation of potential failures.

— Henry Petroski

As engineers, we were going to be in a position to change the world - not just study it.

— Henry Petroski

Because every design must satisfy competing objectives, there necessarily has to be compromise among, if not the complete exclusion of, some of those objectives, in order to meet what are considered the more important of them.

— Henry Petroski

Because they are so humbled by their creations, engineers are naturally conservative in their expectations of technology. They know that the perfect system is the stuff of science fiction, not of engineering fact, and so everything must be treated with respect.

— Henry Petroski

Case studies of failure should be made a part of the vocabulary of every engineer so that he or she can recall or recite them when something in a new design or design process is suggestive of what went wrong in the case study.

— Henry Petroski

Design is nothing if not decision-making.

— Henry Petroski

Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure.

— Henry Petroski

Everything we do is designed, whether we're producing a magazine, a website, or a bridge. Design is really the creative invention that designs everything.

— Henry Petroski

Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

— Henry Petroski