"As control engineers and scientists, we have greatly altered the way people and nations live and interact with one another. We have helped to create a world in which people live longer, enjoy better health, are better educated, and can travel and communicate over greater distances. But the systems that provide these better lives are fragile systems subject to unpredictable failures and possible destruction. We have also helped to create a world in which international relations are such that the very civilizations we have helped to build over centuries can be destroyed in a matter of hours."

“A perennial problem of any organization which is involved in systems work of a changing nature is the need for the organization itself to change as it adapts to new opportunities, new objectives, new equipment, and new people.”

“In a society which is producing more people, more materials, more things, and more information than ever before, systems engineering is indispensable in meeting the challenge of complexity.”

“From a pessimistic viewpoint, it can be stated that there is no good general way of structuring a system. However, from an optimistic point of view one can say that a number of good ways of structuring systems exist and that some are better than others for any particular system. In this and the following sections, there will be a presentation of a number of structuring approaches that have merit and have been employed successfully, including functional structuring, equipment structuring, and use of various coordinate systems.”

“The process of formulating and structuring a system are important and creative, since they provide and organize the information, which each system. "establishes the number of objectives and the balance between them which will be optimized". Furthermore, they help identify and define the system parts. Furthermore, they help identify and define the system parts which make up its "diverse, specialized structures and subfunctions.”

“Hall of Fame: Harold Chestnut at Edisontechcenter.org”

“Knowledge about the process being modeled starts fairly low, then increases as understanding is obtained and tapers off to a high value at the end.”