My biggest worry is I’m running out of time and energy. Thirty years ago I thought 10 years was a really long time. – Dean Kamen
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. – Dean Kamen
Some broad themes brought me where I am today. At a very young age, my hobby became thinking and finding connections. – Dean Kamen
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. – Dean Kamen
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. – Dean Kamen
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. – Dean Kamen
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. – Dean Kamen
Nobody expects that just because they’ve made computers better they’re going to give them to you free. – Dean Kamen
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. – Dean Kamen
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. – Dean Kamen
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. – Dean Kamen
I don’t work on a project unless I believe that it will dramatically improve life for a bunch of people. – Dean Kamen
Most of the time you will fail, but you will also occasionally succeed. Those occasional successes make all the hard work and sacrifice worthwhile. – Dean Kamen
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. – Dean Kamen
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. – Dean Kamen
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. – Dean Kamen
I do not want to waste any time. And if you are not working on important things, you are wasting time. – Dean Kamen
Whatever the marketplace, if talented people are given resources, they’re going to keep driving us to having better, simpler, cheaper solutions to problems. – Dean Kamen
Everybody has to be able to participate in a future that they want to live for. That’s what technology can do. – 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. – Dean Kamen
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. – Dean Kamen
Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation. – Dean Kamen
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. – Dean Kamen
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.’ – Dean Kamen
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. – Dean Kamen
