In the culture of America, in a free culture, you get what you celebrate. And in this culture, we have two obsessions, become a group that becomes a group that celebrates sports heroes and entertainment heroes. There's no room left for kids to see even a little bit of the opportunities to really, really get excited about becoming an inventor, an engineer, or a scientist, a problem solver.

I think we have a society which is spending more and more of its money on healthcare as a percent of GDP as a percent of a lot of things. I think that's a measure of success.

You have teenagers thinking they're going to make millions as NBA stars when that's not realistic for even 1 percent of them. Becoming a scientist or engineer is.

I think in our lifetime, that level of acceptance of "well, we couldn't do any better," won't be tolerated. We're going to start to see individual therapies customized for individual patients, and it's going to change the way people get 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

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.

It’s not what you do – it’s what you are becoming.