Dean Kamen Quotes

We can't live any more in a world which is based on stuff and not ideas. If you want to live with the world of stuff, we're all doomed.

[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.'

I would argue that 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Technology is how we create wealth, how we cure diseases, how we'll build an environment that's sustainable and also gives people the capacity to pull more out of this world and still leave it better than when they found it.

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.

The future is going to require really smart people. What we think are crises today probably will be no big deal, and we have no idea what will really be crises in the future.

As we move towards 8 or 10 billion people on the planet, there's a little less gold per capita. Each one of us will continue to be fighting over an ever smaller percentage of total resources. This is not a happy thought.

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

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

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

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