Quotes from Dean Kamen

I think an education is not only important, it is the most important thing you can do with your life.

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

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

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

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

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.

In a free society, you get what you celebrate.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I do not want to waste any time. And if you are not working on important things, you are wasting time.

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.

Our healthcare system has seen some of the greatest achievements of the human intellect since we started recording history: We're developing incredible devices and implantables to improve the quantity and quality of people's lives.

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.

[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.'

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

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

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.

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

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.