Dean Kamen

“I remember, as a kid, thinking more about, you know, watching the world go by and being amazed by how both complex but consistent and elegant it was. You know, why, you know, when you put th...”

“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.”

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

“My plane is a Premiere; it has very efficient gas turbine engines. It goes very fast on relatively little fuel. Flying has been my passion since I was a kid.”

“I'm a human entropy producer.”

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

“I've spent quite a bit of time working on wind turbines and exploring control systems and photovoltaic and integration system.”

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

“Innovation is so hard and so frustrating; it takes the intersections of people with courage, vision, and resources.”

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

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

“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 mak...”

“Thinking is my hobby. But sometimes you get to where you're stuck and you can't figure it out, so you just go work on another project. I always have multiple projects.”

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

“I've never had a business plan. Every project we've ever done was the intersection of somebody with a real need, a real passion to do something, and hustling.”

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

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

“We're working on ways to make potable water from polluted water, whether it has organics in it or salt from the ocean, at very low energy input.”

“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.”

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