Dean Kamen

Inventor

1951-04-05

Quotes by Dean Kamen

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

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• I consider high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate.

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

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

  Read quote