Quotes by Dean Kamen

• New ideas in technology are literally a dime-a-dozen, or cheaper than that.
• 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.
• Some broad themes brought me where I am today. At a very young age, my hobby became thinking and finding connections.
• Sometimes we crash and burn. It's better to do it in private.
• The city needs a car like a fish needs a bicycle.
• 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.
• To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions.
• My biggest worry is I'm running out of time and energy. Thirty years ago I thought 10 years was a really long time.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• I consider high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate.
• I don't want to think about how many people have thought or still think that I'm crazy.
• Everybody has to be able to participate in a future that they want to live for. That's what technology can do.
• 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.
• My biggest failure is I have too many to talk about.
• I don't work on a project unless I believe that it will dramatically improve life for a bunch of people.
• 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.
• I think an education is not only important, it is the most important thing you can do with your life.
• I'd rather lose my own money than someone else's.
• I'm a human entropy producer.
• If history is any indication, all truths will eventually turn out to be false.
• 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.
• Most of the time you will fail, but you will also occasionally succeed. Those occasional successes make all the hard work and sacrifice worthwhile.
• 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.