Dean Kamen

Get used to dealing with failure as long as it doesn't hurt people around you, as long as it doesn't hurt you physically, or it doesn't hurt you so much that you can't pick yourself up.

Our healthcare system has seen some of the greatest achievements of the human intellect since we started recording history: We're developing incredible devices and implantables to improve the quantity and quality of people's lives.

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.

Innovation is so hard and so frustrating; it takes the intersections of people with courage, vision, and resources.

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.

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.

I've spent quite a bit of time working on wind turbines and exploring control systems and photovoltaic and integration system.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

New ideas in technology are literally a dime-a-dozen, or cheaper than that.

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

In some cases, inventions prohibit innovation because we're so caught up in playing with the technology, we forget about the fact that it was supposed to be important.

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