Dean Kamen Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I'm a human entropy producer.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

[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.'

We cant live any more in a world which is based on stuff and not ideas. If you want to live with the world of stuff, were all doomed.

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.

Nobody expects that just because they've made computers better they're going to give them to you free.

Get used to dealing with failure as long as it doesn't hurt people around you, as long as it doesn't hurt you physically, or it doesn't hurt you so much that you can't pick yourself up.

My father spent his entire early career as an illustrator for comic books: EC Comics like 'Tales from the Crypt' and 'Creepshow, ' then moving on to such magazines as 'Mad' and 'Weird Science.'

Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation.