Top 55 James Dyson Quotes

My interest in film is sort of catholic – apart from science fiction and horror movies, I’ll watch almost everything.

China can and will be an invaluable trading partner to both the U.S. and the U.K.

We need to encourage investors to invest in high-technology startups.

As an engineer I’m constantly spotting problems and plotting how to solve them.

I don’t believe in brands.

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.

Stumbling upon the next great invention in an ‘ah-ha!’ moment is a myth.

There’s nothing wrong with things taking time.

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.

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.

Some people are academically inclined, some vocationally and we shouldn’t penalise the latter.

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.

Don’t listen to experts.

When decisions on nuclear power stations and runways are delayed and the government dilly-dallies, people think they aren’t important.

Companies are not ingenious, it’s the people in them that are.

Arbitrary benchmarks cheat kids out of a fulfilling education.

Apartments are getting smaller on a whole. Houses are getting smaller. People don’t need great big vacuums anymore.

Goodness, I know nothing about nuclear energy.

Anger is a good motivator.

Life is a mountain of solvable problems, and I enjoy that.

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.

Engineering is treated with disdain, on the whole. It’s considered to be rather boring and irrelevant, yet neither of those is true.

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.

If robots are to clean our homes, they’ll have to do it better than a person.

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.

If you want to do something different, you’re going to come up against a lot of naysayers.

I’ve fought court battles over my inventions before.

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.

The computer dictates how you do something, whereas with a pencil you’re totally free.

Today, computers are almost second nature to most of us.

Designing aircraft and racing cars is an extremely exciting thing.

I want entrepreneurs to be engineers and scientists and designers; they don’t necessarily have to be Internet entrepreneurs or retail entrepreneurs.

You need a stubborn belief in an idea in order to see it realised.

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.

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.

One of the most fun inventions of my lifetime is the Mini.

Failure is an enigma. You worry about it, and it teaches you something.

I myself scraped seven poor passes at O-level.

I don’t design down to a price.

Fear is always a good motivator.

Business is constantly changing, constantly evolving.

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.

Nobody wants the expenditure of a lease on a factory which lasts 21 years. You can’t plan 21 years ahead.

As a modern employer you have to treat people well.

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.

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.

Children want the challenge of difficult tasks – just look how much better they are than their parents on a computer.

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.

The one size fits all approach of standardized testing is convenient but lazy.

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.

I think the search engines are the new equivalent of publishing: an enabler of information.

So I think the winners in recession are the people who produce new technology that does things better, which people really want.

Reality TV is anything but.

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.

Everybody recognizes that if you can make very efficient electric motors, you can make a quantum leap forward.