Dean Kamen Quotes
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Nothing that has value, real value, has no cost. Not freedom, not food, not shelter, not healthcare.
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I do not want to waste any time. And if you are not working on important things, you are wasting time.
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In a free society, you get what you celebrate.
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To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions
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My biggest failure is I have too many to talk about.
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The city needs a car like a fish needs a bicycle.
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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.
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It’s not what you do – it’s what you are becoming.
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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?
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Innovation needs to be nurtured throughout an organization. Management is doing things right, whereas leadership is doing the right things.
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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
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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.
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Most of the time you will fail, but you will also occasionally succeed. Those occasional successes make all the hard work and sacrifice worthwhile.
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More than ever, the world needs good engineers. However, the pool of talent is shrinking not growing.
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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.
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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.
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What really makes it an invention is that someone decides not to change the solution to a known problem, but to change the question.
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[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.'
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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.
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Sometimes we crash and burn. It's better to do it in private.
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I'd rather lose my own money than someone else's.
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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.
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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.
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I don't work on a project unless I believe that it will dramatically improve life for a bunch of people.
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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.
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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.
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I think an education is not only important, it is the most important thing you can do with your life.
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Segway will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy.
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I consider high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate
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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
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