James Dyson

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

As a modern employer you have to treat people well.

Design and technology should be the subject where mathematical brainboxes and science whizzkids turn their bright ideas into useful products.

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

Reality TV is anything but.

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

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.

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.

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.

When you can't compete on cost, compete on quality.

Designing aircraft and racing cars is an extremely exciting thing.

The web is fascinating and transformative, but it's an easy, flashy, get-rich-quick option to the hard graft of proper industry.

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.

Don't listen to experts.

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

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

Goodness, I know nothing about nuclear energy.

Anger is a good motivator.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I don't believe in brands.

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

I don't design down to a price.

I don't do something necessarily to make a big profit or because it's a logical business decision.

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

Emerging markets are hugely important.

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.

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.

Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success.

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.

I don't particularly follow the Bauhaus school of design, where you make everything into a black box - simplify it.

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.

An inventor's path is chorused with groans, riddled with fist-banging and punctuated by head scratches.

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

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

Far too few designers put any thought into usability, ending up with a great product that's completely inaccessible.

We should have A-levels in vocational subjects.

There's nothing wrong with things taking time.

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

Insurance companies don't make anything.

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.

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

Beauty can come in strange forms.

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

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.

In the digital age of 'overnight' success stories such as Facebook, the hard slog is easily overlooked.

We should learn to live more with our climate and rely less on electricity to alter our climate.

I myself scraped seven poor passes at O-level.

I like living on the edge.

Business is constantly changing, constantly evolving.

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

People will make leaps of faith and get excited by your product if you just get it in front of them.

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

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.

I hate science fiction.

People buy products if they're better.

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

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.

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

Arbitrary benchmarks cheat kids out of a fulfilling education.

Britain's great strength is its innovative, design and engineering natural ability and we're not using it.

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

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

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.

The media thinks that you have to make science sexy and concentrate on themes such as rivalry and the human issues.

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.

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

You don't get inspiration sitting at a drawing board or in front of your computer.

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.

Engineers are behind the cars we drive, the pills we pop and the way we power our homes.

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

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.

The wonderful thing about Apple technology is just how intuitive it is.

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

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.

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.

Fear is always a good motivator.

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

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