All the world’s an analog stage and digital circuits play only bit parts.

— Anonymous

Analog circuit design is like chess—just because you know how the pieces move doesn’t mean you know how to play the game.

— Patrick M. Lahey

Jesus establishes the binary basis of digital electronics in the Sermon on the Mount:

Simply let your “Yes” be “Yes,” and your “No,” “No;” anything beyond this comes from the evil one.

— Jesus Christ, Matthew 5:37 (NIV)

It was stylish, even recently, to say that the only good electronics is that which says Yes and No. There is nothing to be gained in disputing these allegations, least of all by excited rejoinder. The continuous active analog is in its infancy, and time is (literally) running in its favor.

— George A. Philbrick, “Analogs Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow”

As an old analog guru once said when comparing the analog and digital disciplines, “Any idiot can count to one, but analog design requires the engineer to make intelligent trade-offs to optimize a circuit.” Analog design is not black or white as in “ones” and “zeros;” analog design is shades of gray.

— Samuel Wilensky, “Reflections of a Dinosaur”

It’s bad enough that hundreds of people are already “designing” CMOS VLSI without any significant knowledge of silicon devices and circuits and sometimes without much idea of the physics of hardware in the broader sense. As electronic systems become increasingly complex, this type of design will inevitably dominate, certainly for large-scale digital systems. But I wonder how many potentially useful ideas in the meadowlands of analog circuits will never be discovered because the world of the twenty-first century was taught that analog is dead?

— Barrie Gilbert, “Where Do Little Circuits Come From?”

I get the feeling that the development of new circuit topologies is viewed by the newcomer to circuit design as something akin to magic. I’m not speaking here of architectures of increasing grandeur—LSI, VLSI, ULSI—those best expressed on flickering VDUs as annotated rectangles linked by one-way causal arrows or described by the liturgy of disciplined algorithms, syllogism upon syllogism. Rather, I’m thinking about those happy little tunes that weave three of four active elements together in some memorable relationship, the themes, rich in harmonic possibilities, from which countless variations unfold. In these deceptively innocent and simple systems, cause and effect are inextricably bound.

— Barrie Gilbert, “Where Do Little Circuits Come From?”

Some twenty years ago, I asserted at a seminar presented at UC Berkeley that the art of analog design demanded 30% attention to the signal path and 70% to biasing. The comment was met with tolerant disbelief. However, after having taught this maxim widely and persistently during the intervening decades, I find no reason to change my mind.

— Barrie Gilbert, “Biasing Techniques for RF/IF Signal Processing”

Once upon a time, two women engineers, one specializing in digital design and the other in analog, were working together in lab. Suddenly, a handsome man appeared at the door, attracting the attention of both women. The hunk promptly announced, “Every ten seconds, I will cut the distance between us in half.” The digital designer looked disappointed and exclaimed, “That’s terrible! He’ll never get here.” The analog designer smiled and replied, “That’s okay, he’ll get close enough.”

— Samuel Wilensky, adapted from “Reflections of a Dinosaur”

I am not an anti-digital lobbyist. I don’t want to change the world and get rid of digital. It does valuable things. It’s changed the face of society.... I just don’t like doing it.

— Barrie Gilbert, quoted in the San Fransisco Chronicle, 1999

If your computer persists in lying to you—junk that digital piece of disaster—throw it off the roof. You’ll feel much better about it—and the computer will never lie to you again.

— Robert A. Pease, Troubleshooting Analog Circuits

Everyone’s familiar with the adage, “garbage in, garbage out,” but you also have to remember that you can put perfectly good stuff in and still get garbage out.

— R. David Middlebrook, “Real World Design”

Block diagrams...are useful visual representations of general linear systems governed by a set of linear differential equations. They are mainly useful in linear system theory where no specific physical systems are considered. Network analysis deals with electrical circuit diagrams which are approximate visual representations of physical circuits designed, built and tested in a laboratory. It is precisely in this respect that network theory and linear system theory differ from each other and, hence, any effort to transform electrical circuits into block diagrams or nodes and branches on rootless trees is a waste of analytical effort.

— Vachté Vorpérian, Fast Analytical Techniques for Electrical and Electronic Circuits, 2002, p. 17.

An M-O-S-T is inferior
Because it has no damned interior
It’s only the surface
That serves any purpose
And a surface just can’t be superior.

— Old-timers’ limerick, Device Research Conference