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.

- 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

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

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

- 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

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

I'm a human entropy producer.

- 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

Sometimes we crash and burn. It's better to do it in private.

- Dean Kamen

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

- Dean Kamen

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.

- Dean Kamen

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

- Dean Kamen

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

- Dean Kamen

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

- Dean Kamen

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.

- 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 would argue that education, actual learning - it is hard work. It's very personal. Your parents don't teach you anything. Your teachers don't teach you anything. The government doesn't teach you anything. You read it. You don't understand it; you read it again. You break a pencil and read it again.

- Dean Kamen

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.

- Dean Kamen

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

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.

- Dean Kamen