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 that cold glass of water on the table, it kind of warms up at a very predictable way.”

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

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

“We all know about certain problems we wish we didn't have.”

“We can't live any more in a world which is based on stuff and not ideas. If you want to live with the world of stuff, we're all doomed.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”