Dean Kamen Quotes

People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.

My biggest worry is I'm running out of time and energy. Thirty years ago I thought 10 years was a really long time.

A patent, or invention, is any assemblage of technologies or ideas that you can put together that nobody put together that way before. That's how the patent office defines it. That's an invention

An innovation is one of those things that society looks at and says, if we make this part of the way we live and work, it will change the way we live and work.

Most of the time you will fail, but you will also occasionally succeed. Those occasional successes make all the hard work and sacrifice worthwhile.

Life is so short. Why waste a single day of it doing something that doesn't matter, that doesn't try to do something big?

I do not want to waste any time. And if you are not working on important things, you are wasting time.

In the culture of America, in a free culture, you get what you celebrate. And in this culture, we have two obsessions, become a group that becomes a group that celebrates sports heroes and entertainment heroes. There's no room left for kids to see even a little bit of the opportunities to really, really get excited about becoming an inventor, an engineer, or a scientist, a problem solver.

It’s not what you do – it’s what you are becoming.

I don't work on a project unless I believe that it will dramatically improve life for a bunch of people.

The city needs a car like a fish needs a bicycle.

Education, actual learning - it is hard work. It's very personal. Your parents don't teach you anything. Your teachers don't teach you anything. The government doesn't teach you anything. You read it. You don't understand it; you read it again. You break a pencil and read it again.

Inspiration comes from the heart. The letter ‘I’ is the heart of F”I”RST… (F Inspiration R S T).

More than ever, the world needs good engineers. However, the pool of talent is shrinking not growing.

I think an education is not only important, it is the most important thing you can do with your life.

What really makes it an invention is that someone decides not to change the solution to a known problem, but to change the question.

You have teenagers thinking they're going to make millions as NBA stars when that's not realistic for even 1 percent of them. Becoming a scientist or engineer is.

Everybody has to be able to participate in a future that they want to live for. That's what technology can do.

Innovation needs to be nurtured throughout an organization. Management is doing things right, whereas leadership is doing the right things.

Tell me it's never been done. Because the only real laws in this world-the only things we really know-are the two postulates of relativity, the three laws of Newton, the four laws of thermodynamics, and Maxwell's equation-no, scratch that, the only things we really know are Maxwell's equations, the three laws of Newton, the two postulates of relativity, and the periodic table. That's all we know that's true. All the rest are man's laws

Sporting competitions seem to be what we obsess over, frankly. So if we can put engineering, science, technology into a format of healthy, fun competition, we can attract all sorts of kids that might not see the kind of activity we do as accessible or rewarding.

Kids are intimidated by the way science and technology is presented. It's made, frankly, quite boring and it becomes part of a curriculum that chases particularly women and minorities away.

If history is any indication, all truths will eventually turn out to be false.

We are in a race between knowledge and catastrophe. If we keep track of what is important, never lower our standards or forget why we are here, we have the ability to determine the fate of the world.

Clearly, there are many places where diesel is king or gas-turbine is king, or IC engines will win, but there are many places in the world where, as we've seen, they just won't do the job. The modern version of the Stirling engine has some very, very attractive characteristics, and we're trying to optimize it for some of those applications.

Sometimes we crash and burn. It's better to do it in private.

Some broad themes brought me where I am today. At a very young age, my hobby became thinking and finding connections.

I don't want to think about how many people have thought or still think that I'm crazy.

New ideas in technology are literally a dime-a-dozen, or cheaper than that

In a free society, you get what you celebrate.

Americans thinking that America will continue to lead the world in innovation and quality of life without some quick and serious educational improvements are dangerously delusional.

The word entrepreneur is associated with success and adventure. From my life, the only thing I can tell you that's consistently associated with entrepreneurship is failure, and the only thing consistently associated with invention is frustration. There is a long road between the idea and the reality.

Nothing that has value, real value, has no cost. Not freedom, not food, not shelter, not healthcare.

I'm a human entropy producer.

I'd rather lose my own money than someone else's.

I consider high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate

Whatever the marketplace, if talented people are given resources, they're going to keep driving us to having better, simpler, cheaper solutions to problems.

If you're going to fail, you might as well fail at the big ones.

Invention and entrepreneurship isn't about pure technology. Most people take whatever they see in front of them and relate it to something they understand. For at least ten years after Ford started building cars, people called them horseless carriages. It wasn't obvious to call it a car. They used to call the radio 'the wireless.' Innovation is much more about changing people and their perceptions and their attitudes and their willingness to accept change than it is about physics and engineering.

In some cases, inventions prohibit innovation because we're so caught up in playing with the technology, we forget about the fact that it was supposed to be important.

There is just so much stuff in the world that, to me, is devoid of any real substance, value, and content that I just try to make sure that I am working on things that matter.

I think we have a society which is spending more and more of its money on healthcare as a percent of GDP as a percent of a lot of things. I think that's a measure of success.

I think our society is no longer properly valuing the intangible potential of innovation, even if we have to be a little uncomfortable with the risks associated with it, and a little bit willing to fail, pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off and try again. We don’t seem to want to do that as much as we used too.

We live in a world where virtually everybody expects there's going to be some reasonable therapy for virtually any situation.

To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions

I think in our lifetime, that level of acceptance of "well, we couldn't do any better," won't be tolerated. We're going to start to see individual therapies customized for individual patients, and it's going to change the way people get healthcare.

I started realizing that I wasn't so dumb; rather, most people simply didn't know the answers to the questions that I was interested in-or they didn't care

My biggest failure is I have too many to talk about.

Segway will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy.

[Chuck's wife] was standing behind me at the time and she said, 'Chuck hasn't fed himself in 19 years. So, you've got a choice: We keep the arm, or you keep Chuck.'