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

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

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

Everybody has to be able to participate in a future that they want to live for. That's what technology can do.
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 do not want to waste any time. And if you are not working on important things, you are wasting time.
Dean Kamen

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

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

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


I'd rather lose my own money than someone else's.
Dean Kamen

I'm a human entropy producer.
Dean Kamen

If history is any indication, all truths will eventually turn out to be false.
Dean Kamen

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

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.
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

My biggest failure is I have too many to talk about.
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

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