Dean Kamen Quotes
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Don't be irresponsible in your risks, but as long as the project can fail without it causing the person to fail, keep trying; keep taking the best shots. Learn from them; pick yourself up.
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My biggest worry is I'm running out of time and energy. Thirty years ago I thought 10 years was a really long time.
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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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As a kid, I was less interested in the physical tinkering than thinking about what we would now call the physics, as opposed to the engineering.
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Some broad themes brought me where I am today. At a very young age, my hobby became thinking and finding connections.
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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.
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If history is any indication, all truths will eventually turn out to be false.
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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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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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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.
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I've never regretted anything I've done, even the things that I've failed at. I've often regretted not trying something really big, because you'll never know.
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Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation.
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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.
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I'd rather lose my own money than someone else's.
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If people ridicule you, look them in the eye and say, 'Yeah, I may have failed, but at least I tried,' and get on with it.
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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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The city needs a car like a fish needs a bicycle.
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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.'
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Everybody has to be able to participate in a future that they want to live for. That's what technology can do.
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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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I'm a human entropy producer.
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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.