Dean Kamen Quotes

It's worth being suspicious of writers - or anyone! - who does that myth-making thing. There's always a tendency to retrospectively impose structures on a life. Life as it's lived has a far more complex shape.

We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that.

There is an element of luck, there is an element of trial and error, sometimes you fail, sometimes you succeed. It's not as beautifully simple as it may seem when we are talking about it.

History is moving in zig-zags and by roundabout ways.

As time passes, the actual complexity of our history - even of our own personal experience - gets buried under the weight of the ideal image.

Sometimes I play as simply as possible, in one or two touches. But I also make bad decisions, I make mistakes, and I try too-complicated things.

I used to take everything at face value. Because, when I say something, I mean it... so I used to feel that everybody else meant what they said. But of course that wasn't true. And life isn't that sweet and simple.

All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.

Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.

The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.

The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.

Simplicity is no longer presented as a virtue. The value of complex and difficult language has been preached with such insistence that the public has begun to believe the lack of clarity must be a sign of artistic talent.

Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate. A plurality (of reasons) should not be posited without necessity.

As for the complex ways of living, I love them not, however much I practice them. In as many places as possible, I will get my feet down to the earth.

It may be said that it is with our thoughts as with our flowers. Those whose expression is simple carry their seed with them; those that are double by their richness and pomp charm the mind, but produce nothing.

From naive simplicity we arrive at more profound simplicity.

Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.

There are many secrets; don’t try to resolve them all.

To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.

Women are complex and subtle. Men are simple and direct.

It is vain philosophy that supposes more causes than are exactly adequate to explain the phenomena of things.

How could anything so sublimely complicated not be the simple answer?

Measures are an innovation that changed a world of innocent and noble simplicity into one forever filled with dishonesty.

The beauty of simplicity is the complexity it attracts.

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem