Military Engineer Quotes (2 quotes)
A large part of the training of the engineer, civil and military, as far as preparatory studies are concerned; of the builder of every fabric of wood or stone or metal designed to stand upon the earth, or bridge the stream, or resist or float upon the wave; of the surveyor who lays out a building lot in a city, or runs a boundary line between powerful governments across a continent; of the geographer, navigator, hydrographer, and astronomer,—must be derived from the mathematics.
In 'Academical Education', Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions (1870), Vol. 3, 513.
The military engineer had died and his close relative, the civil engineer, had taken his place.
Reported as “one regimental commander declared…” and given as a narrative statement, not within quotation marks. The context is that by World War II, “engineer work in war … covered a far wider technical range than ever before in American military engineering experience,” with increasingly “complex and extensive” operations. In Beck, Bortz, Lynch, Mayo and Weld, 'Introduction' The Corps of Engineers: The War Against Germany (1988), 3. For more background on the change, a footnote cites William Barclay Parsons, The American Engineers in France (1920), 5-7.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
