Dean Kamen

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

Lots of people ask me for advice as if I somehow have found some easy way to create a solution to a problem, and there's no such thing.

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.

I'm a human entropy producer.

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.

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

My biggest worry is I'm running out of time and energy. Thirty years ago I thought 10 years was a really long time.

Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation.

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

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.