Quotes from Dean Kamen

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.

The future is going to require really smart people. What we think are crises today probably will be no big deal, and we have no idea what will really be crises in the future.

We cant live any more in a world which is based on stuff and not ideas. If you want to live with the world of stuff, were all doomed.

Lots of people ask me for advice as if I somehow have found some easy way to create a solution to a problem, and there's no such thing.

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.

I'd rather lose my own money than someone else's.

Kids are intimidated by the way science and technology is presented. It's made, frankly, quite boring and it becomes part of a curriculum that chases particularly women and minorities away.

The city needs a car like a fish needs a bicycle.

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.

You can't look at the problem and say, 'I want them to do more, better, faster miracles - and not invest in research, not invest in development, and have those miracles delivered to me free.' It's unrealistic.

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.

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

I don't work on a project unless I believe that it will dramatically improve life for a bunch of people.

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.

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.

Some broad themes brought me where I am today. At a very young age, my hobby became thinking and finding connections.

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.

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.

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.

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

Everybody has to be able to participate in a future that they want to live for. That's what technology can do.