DEAN KAMEN

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

Sporting competitions seem to be what we obsess over, frankly. So if we can put engineering, science, technology into a format of healthy, fun competition, we can attract all sorts of kids that might not see the kind of activity we do as accessible or rewarding.

I'm a human entropy producer.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions.

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.

More than ever, the world needs good engineers. However, the pool of talent is shrinking not growing.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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