James Dyson Quotes

What I've learned from running is that the time to push hard is when you're hurting like crazy and you want to give up. Success is often just around the corner.

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.

In order to fix it, you need a passionate anger about something that doesn't work well.

Research is about conducting experiments, accepting and even enjoying failures, but going on and on, following a theory garnered from observing the science. Invention is often more about endurance and patient observation than brainwaves.

Invention is often more about endurance and patient observation than brainwaves.

Maleness has functioned in our race much like whiteness has in the larger culture: its privileges have been rendered normal, its perspectives natural, its biases neutral, its ideas superior, its anger wholly justifiable, and its way of being the gift of God to the universe.

Learning by trial and error, or experimentation, can be exciting, the lessons learned deeply engrained. Learning by failure is a remarkably good way of gaining knowledge. Failure is to be welcomed rather than avoided. It is a part of learning. It should not be feared by the engineer or scientist or indeed by anyone else.

If we are committed to discerning, then defeating, the contemporary logic of racism, we must separate it from its ties to democracy itself. In order to be true patriots, we must become disloyal to chronically prejudiced views of American society that persist in our rather ignoble Trumpian moment.

Stamina and determination along with creativity are needed in overcoming seemingly impossible difficulties in research and other challenges in life.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson once argued, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

Equally, I learned that most people don’t really know exactly what they want, or if they do it’s only from what they know, what is available or possible at the time. As Henry Ford said, famously, if he had asked American farmers what they wanted in terms of future transport, they would have answered ‘faster horses’. You need to show them new possibilities, new ideas and new products and explain these as lucidly as possible. Dyson advertising focuses on how our products are engineered and how they work, rather than on gimmicks and snappy sales lines.

Feynman did have an extraordinary affinity for his friends’ children. He would entertain them with gibberish, or with juggling tricks, or with what sounded to Dyson like a one-man percussion band. He could enthrall them merely by borrowing someone’s eyeglasses and slowly putting them on, taking them off, and putting them on. Or he would engage them in conversation. He once asked Henry Bethe, “Did you know there are twice as many numbers as numbers?” “No, there are not!” Henry said. Feynman said he could prove it. “Name a number.” “One million.” Feynman said, “Two million.” “Twenty-seven!” Feynman said, “Fifty-four,” and kept on countering with the number that was twice Henry’s, until suddenly Henry saw the point. It was his first real encounter with infinity.

They reached Albuquerque, Dyson seeing for the first time the deceptively clear air and the red desert beneath still snowy peaks. Feynman bore into town at 70 miles per hour and was immediately arrested for a rapid sequence of traffic violations. The justice of the peace announced that the fine he handed down was a personal record.

else. This remains a nontestable hypothesis, for now. Dyson goes on to quote science fiction writer Simon

Snow found the British system of education guilty. Since the Victorian era, science had been overshadowed in schools by humanities and especially by the teaching of Greek and Latin. Where German and American schools valued science and technology, we in Britain tended to look down on these subjects, and on industry, as somehow grubby, or, if not grubby, then somehow uncultured and even anti-intellectual. I’m afraid, C. P. Snow, that nothing much has changed. If anything, science and engineering are even more looked-down-on today.

This, I fundamentally believe, is why scientists and engineers will do more than politicians and activists to solve today’s environmental problems. They have more than words. They have solutions.

In fact, like Norton and Ramadan, most entrepreneurs are “replicative,” that is, they take an existing product or idea and make it better. This is what Howard Head and James Dyson did. This process of incremental or iterative improvement is the basis of almost all innovation. Innovation proceeds in phases; inventors take what exists and create accretive combinations. Often an innovation comes down to having brought existing things together in a way never before seen.

In 1959, the scientist and novelist C. P. Snow gave a famous lecture, ‘The Two Cultures’, on the ever-growing and unhealthy divide he saw between science and the humanities.

Renormalization had entered physics in the 1940s as a part of quantum theory that made it possible to calculate interactions of electrons and photons. A problem with such calculations, as with the calculations Kadanoff and Wilson worried about, was that some items seemed to require treatment as infinite quantities, a messy and unpleasant business. Renormalizing the system, in ways devised by Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, Freeman Dyson, and other physicists, got rid of the infinities. Only much later, in the 1960s, did Wilson dig down to the underlying basis for renormalization’s success. Like Kadanoff, he thought about scaling principles. Certain quantities, such as the mass of a particle, had always been considered fixed—as the mass of any object in everyday experience is fixed. The renormalization shortcut succeeded by acting as though a quantity like mass were not fixed at all. Such quantities seemed to float up or down depending on the scale from which they were viewed. It seemed absurd. Yet it was an exact analogue of what Benoit Mandelbrot was realizing about geometrical shapes and the coastline of England. Their length could not be measured independent of scale. There was a kind of relativity in which the position of the observer, near or far, on the beach or in a satellite, affected the measurement. As Mandelbrot, too, had seen, the variation across scales was not arbitrary; it followed rules. Variability in the standard measures of mass or length meant that a different sort of quantity was remaining fixed. In the case of fractals, it was the fractional dimension—a constant that could be calculated and used as a tool for further calculations. Allowing mass to vary depending on scale meant that mathematicians could recognize similarity across scales.

My tale is one of not being brilliant. I wasn’t even trained as an engineer or scientist. I did, however, have the bloody-mindedness not to follow convention, to challenge experts and to ignore Doubting Thomases. I am also someone who is prepared to slog through prototype after prototype searching for the breakthrough. If a slow starter like me could succeed, surely this might encourage others.

Baldwin didn’t write sociological treatises like W.E.B. Du Bois, or ethnographic studies like Zora Neale Hurston. His forte was the essay—the long developing, deeply personal rumination on the psychic and cultural status of his people and the moral and spiritual health of our nation. The way he plumbed the American soul has lasted precisely because it is rooted in issues that are, tragically, evergreen. In some ways, black life didn’t matter much then, and doesn’t matter much now. Police batons still flail black flesh; police bullets still unjustly riddle black bodies. Whiteness continues to metastasize across the body politic like a cancer that only goes into remission, sporadically, under the radiating prose and edifying action of a prophet.

Jimmy and his activist friends were there to tell Bobby about the suffering that had scarred each black person in that room; that had scarred or killed people they loved; that had buried their communities in poverty; that had withheld their right to vote; that had lynched their grandfathers, raped their grandmothers, set the dogs on their children, called them “nigger” for daring to sit at a lunch counter; that had tried to deprive their children of education, their mothers of dignity in domestic labor, their fathers the dignity of being called “sir” and not “boy” at the age of 60. Bobby did not want the responsibility of bearing witness to their pain and their rage. Witness often exposes the unspoken claims of whiteness—its privilege to hide, its ability to deflect black suffering into comparatively sterile discussions of policy that take the heat off of “me” and put it on “that.

As hip hop has made clear—and black religion, too, for that matterwhen we conceive of the horrors we confront, they have a masculine tint; we measure the terrors we face by calculating their harm to our men and boys. Thus the role of our artists has often been limited to validating the experiences, expressions, and desires of boys and men. When we name those plagued by police violence, we cite the names of the boys and men but not the names of the girls and women. We take special note of how black boys are unfairly kicked out of school while ignoring that our girls are right next to them in the line of expulsion. We empathize with black men who end up in jail because of a joint they smoked while overlooking the defense against domestic abuse that lands just as many women in jail. We offer authority and celebration to men at church to compensate for how the white world overlooks their talents unless they carry a ball or a tune. We thank black fathers for lovingly parenting their children, and many more of them do so than is recognized in the broader world, which is one reason for our gratitude. But we are relatively thankless for the near superhuman efforts of our mothers to nurture and protect us.

The artist in Hansberry saw in the photograph of a black woman being manhandled by white cops all the suffering, all the injustice, all the offense to black life. The brutality was grave enough; the spread of the image transmitted trauma and reinforced the vulnerability of black women and, indeed, the race.

Design means how something works, not how it looks – the design should evolve from the function. —James Dyson