I hope that you have nothing against malice, my good engineer. In my eyes it is the brightest sword that reason has against the powers of darkness and ugliness. Malice, sir, is the spirit of criticism, and criticism marks the origin of progress and enlightenment.

Ambition is a gilded misery, a secret poison, a hidden plague, the engineer of deceit, the mother of hypocrisy, the parent of envy, the original of vices, the moth of holiness, the blinder of hearts, turning medicines into maladies, and remedies into diseases

I think an engineer sits down and uses a slide rule. I attack problems through intuition.

It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management.

When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don’t throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.

Engineers are dedicated to solving problems and creating new, useful, and efficient things. So should not the world admire and respect them? Answer: Only occasionally.

I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace and propelled by compressible flow.

I tell my engineers that they should not overload me with information.

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

Now each race is different every time because it’s a different journey to get to it – the difficulties you faced getting the car into that position. I manage myself. I chose my team myself. So there’s a huge satisfaction for me.

Whether it’s with my engineers in the team, my home life, or my friends, I don’t like things to get complicated – and one good example would be the steering wheel in my Mercedes Formula 1 car.

Hackathons are these things where just all of the Facebook engineers get together and stay up all night building things. And, I mean, usually at these hackathons, I code too, just alongside everyone.