“Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success.”
― James Dyson
“There’s nothing wrong with things taking time.”
― James Dyson
“Manufacturing is more than just putting parts together. It’s coming up with ideas, testing principles and perfecting the engineering, as well as final assembly.”
― James Dyson
“The one size fits all approach of standardized testing is convenient but lazy.”
― James Dyson
“So I think the winners in recession are the people who produce new technology that does things better, which people really want.”
― James Dyson
“You need a stubborn belief in an idea in order to see it realised.”
― James Dyson
“If you want to do something different, you’re going to come up against a lot of naysayers.”
― James Dyson
“I grew up running miles of the Norfolk coastline. I’d think nothing of a six-mile run before breakfast. I still run, though not as far and not before muesli.”
― James Dyson
“Designing aircraft and racing cars is an extremely exciting thing.”
― James Dyson
“In the past, the U.K. got away with selling things that weren’t unusual. Now it’s no use trying to export without having something that’s unusual and better.”
― James Dyson
“People will make leaps of faith and get excited by your product if you just get it in front of them.”
― James Dyson
“An inventor’s path is chorused with groans, riddled with fist-banging and punctuated by head scratches.”
― James Dyson
“Life is a mountain of solvable problems, and I enjoy that.”
― James Dyson
“I’ve obviously used fans – I wouldn’t say all my life, because we couldn’t afford them when I was young, but from my 20s and onwards we’ve had to use fans. And I’ve always loathed them. Everything about them. The way you adjust them, getting them at the angle you want. Carrying them. Cleaning them. The danger of putting your finger in them.”
― James Dyson
“We should have A-levels in vocational subjects.”
― James Dyson
“As an engineer I’m constantly spotting problems and plotting how to solve them.”
― James Dyson
“When you can’t compete on cost, compete on quality.”
― James Dyson
“What I often do is just think of a completely obtuse thing to do, almost the wrong thing to do. That often works because you start a different approach, something no one has tried.”
― James Dyson
“Companies are not ingenious, it’s the people in them that are.”
― James Dyson
“The British judiciary needs to support intellectual property.”
― James Dyson
“Stumbling upon the next great invention in an ‘ah-ha!’ moment is a myth.”
― James Dyson
“Today, computers are almost second nature to most of us.”
― James Dyson
“Insurance companies don’t make anything.”
― James Dyson
“Some people are academically inclined, some vocationally and we shouldn’t penalise the latter.”
― James Dyson
“Failure is an enigma. You worry about it, and it teaches you something.”
― James Dyson
“The computer dictates how you do something, whereas with a pencil you’re totally free.”
― James Dyson
“At school, I enjoyed playing the bassoon. I was in the orchestra and played the melody when the other boys sang hymns at prayers time.”
― James Dyson
“The wonderful thing about Apple technology is just how intuitive it is.”
― James Dyson
“One of the most fun inventions of my lifetime is the Mini.”
― James Dyson
“I think if you have to pay for your education, you worry very seriously about you’re going to do when you’ve got your degree.”
― James Dyson
“I imported the first Mac into England in 1984; you know, the beige box. I imported what I think were the first four that came into England. I never opened the instruction manual. That was the best thing about it.”
― James Dyson
“In the digital age of ‘overnight’ success stories such as Facebook, the hard slog is easily overlooked.”
― James Dyson
“We have to change our culture so you can create wealth from making things and don’t just try to make money out of money.”
― James Dyson
“I like living on the edge.”
― James Dyson
“People buy products if they’re better.”
― James Dyson
“Everyone has ideas. They may be too busy or lack the confidence or technical ability to carry them out. But I want to carry them out. It is a matter of getting up and doing it.”
― James Dyson
“If you didn’t have patents, no one would bother to spend money on research and development. But with patents, if someone has a good idea and a competitor can’t copy it, then that competitor will have to think of their own way of doing it. So then, instead of just one innovator, you have two or three people trying to do something in a new way.”
― James Dyson
“If you really want to improve technology, if you want things to work better and be better, you’ve got to protect the person who spends a lot of effort, money, and time developing that new technology.”
― James Dyson
“Cordless vacuums are designed for quick jobs, but you need enough power to do the job; you don’t want the power waning over time.”
― James Dyson
“Everybody recognizes that if you can make very efficient electric motors, you can make a quantum leap forward.”
― James Dyson
“Well, I’m rather attracted to rather prosaic things like vacuum cleaners and hand dryers. Where people haven’t apparently made them with a great love for what they’re doing.”
― James Dyson
“Now, we don’t teach children in schools to be creative. We don’t teach them to experiment. We want them to fill in the right answer, tick the right answer in the box.”
― James Dyson
“Well, air-conditioning is not a good thing.”
― James Dyson
“We should learn to live more with our climate and rely less on electricity to alter our climate.”
― James Dyson
“The way the world is going, it’s technology driven. And it isn’t just driven by the old super powers, it’s driven by the far east and new emerging economies.”
― James Dyson
“I think people are realizing that engineering and science are extremely good degrees to get and you’ll be very highly paid once you’ve got them.”
― James Dyson
“I’m afraid I am tidy, and I have to be because the office is open plan and my glass office door is literally always open.”
― James Dyson
“If robots are to clean our homes, they’ll have to do it better than a person.”
― James Dyson
“I’m not into politics but I am committed to a cause: ensuring design technology and engineering stays on the U.K. curriculum, alongside science and maths – grounding abstract theory, merging the practical with the academic.”
― James Dyson
“Apartments are getting smaller on a whole. Houses are getting smaller. People don’t need great big vacuums anymore.”
― James Dyson
“I was frustrated as a child when I had to use a vacuum. It had a screaming noise and the smell of stale dog and a lack of performance.”
― James Dyson
“The media thinks that you have to make science sexy and concentrate on themes such as rivalry and the human issues.”
― James Dyson
“If you invent something, you’re doing a creative act. It’s like writing a novel or composing music. You put your heart and soul into it, and money. It’s years of your life, it’s your house remortgaged, huge emotional investment and financial investment.”
― James Dyson
“I don’t believe in brands.”
― James Dyson
“Goodness, I know nothing about nuclear energy.”
― James Dyson
“The Web is fascinating and transformative, but it’s an easy, flashy, get-rich-quick option to the hard graft of proper industry.”
― James Dyson
“My interest in film is sort of catholic – apart from science fiction and horror movies, I’ll watch almost everything.”
― James Dyson
“I hate science fiction.”
― James Dyson
“When you say ‘design,’ everybody thinks of magazine pages. So it’s an emotive word. Everybody thinks it’s how something looks, whereas for me, design is pretty much everything.”
― James Dyson
“I don’t particularly follow the Bauhaus school of design, where you make everything into a black box – simplify it.”
― James Dyson
“We need to encourage investors to invest in high-technology startups.”
― James Dyson
“Far too few designers put any thought into usability, ending up with a great product that’s completely inaccessible.”
― James Dyson
“Anger is a good motivator.”
― James Dyson
“Nobody wants the expenditure of a lease on a factory which lasts 21 years. You can’t plan 21 years ahead.”
― James Dyson
“As a modern employer you have to treat people well.”
― James Dyson
“I’m not a businessman.”
― James Dyson
“You don’t get inspiration sitting at a drawing board or in front of your computer.”
― James Dyson
“Beauty can come in strange forms.”
― James Dyson
“I think the search engines are the new equivalent of publishing: an enabler of information.”
― James Dyson
“I want entrepreneurs to be engineers and scientists and designers; they don’t necessarily have to be Internet entrepreneurs or retail entrepreneurs.”
― James Dyson
“Design and technology should be the subject where mathematical brainboxes and science whizzkids turn their bright ideas into useful products.”
― James Dyson
“Engineering is treated with disdain, on the whole. It’s considered to be rather boring and irrelevant, yet neither of those is true.”
― James Dyson
“Britain’s great strength is its innovative, design and engineering natural ability and we’re not using it.”
― James Dyson
“It is an extreme perversion of capitalism if you can trade in something before you have even paid for it.”
― James Dyson
“Emerging markets are hugely important.”
― James Dyson
“Business is constantly changing, constantly evolving.”
― James Dyson
“When decisions on nuclear power stations and runways are delayed and the government dilly-dallies, people think they aren’t important.”
― James Dyson
“Engineering undergraduates should not be charged fees. They should receive grants, not student loans, and the government will get the money back long-term from increased exports.”
― James Dyson
“I don’t do something necessarily to make a big profit or because it’s a logical business decision.”
― James Dyson
“I myself scraped seven poor passes at O-level.”
― James Dyson
“Children want the challenge of difficult tasks – just look how much better they are than their parents on a computer.”
― James Dyson
“The U.S. is the biggest investor in research and development in the world. It has the best universities. Keeping them supplied with the best talent is essential.”
― James Dyson
“China has all the advantages in the world. But it doesn’t have a history of free thinking, risk-taking pioneers – the kind of people the U.S. is built upon.”
― James Dyson
“Arbitrary benchmarks cheat kids out of a fulfilling education.”
― James Dyson
“When I started off, I was working in a shed behind my house. All I had was a drill, an electric drill. That was the only machine I had.”
― James Dyson
“Fear is always a good motivator.”
― James Dyson
“I don’t design down to a price.”
― James Dyson
“I own every share of my company, and I don’t want to sell any of it.”
― James Dyson
“I’ve fought court battles over my inventions before.”
― James Dyson
“China can and will be an invaluable trading partner to both the U.S. and the U.K.”
― James Dyson
“Reality TV is anything but.”
― James Dyson
“Engineers are behind the cars we drive, the pills we pop and the way we power our homes.”
― James Dyson
“Don’t listen to experts.”
― James Dyson
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