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Quotes of the Day for 9 January 2005 - Bridges

Joseph Baermann Strauss, builder of the Golden Gate Bridge, was born at Cincinnati, Ohio on this day in 1870. His mother was a pianist, his father a painter, and young Joseph took up poetry and expected a career in the arts. At the University of Cincinnati the five-foot three-inch Strauss tried out for the football team and ended up recovering at some length in the school infirmary, looking out the window at the Cincinnati-Covington Bridge, the first long-span suspension bridge in the US. His subsequent fascination with bridges changed his course, and the engineering firm he founded built several famous ones including San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Today's theme is Bridges.

The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.
     - David Russell

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.
     - I. F. Stone, 1907 – 1989

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.
     - Tom Stoppard

Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it.
     - Indian proverb

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.
     - Herbert George Wells, 1866 - 1946

We are caught up ... on a great wave whether we will or no, a great wave of expansion and progress. All these mechanical inventions - telephones, electricity, steel bridges, horseless vehicles - they are all leading somewhere. It's up to us to be on the inside in the forefront of progress.
     - John Dos Passos, 1896 - 1970

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