You need a stubborn belief in an idea in order to see it realised.
— James Dyson
Engineers are behind the cars we drive, the pills we pop and the way we power our homes.
Stumbling upon the next great invention in an 'ah-ha!' moment is a myth.
I've fought court battles over my inventions before.
Designing aircraft and racing cars is an extremely exciting thing.
Arbitrary benchmarks cheat kids out of a fulfilling education.
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.
In the digital age of 'overnight' success stories such as Facebook, the hard slog is easily overlooked.
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.
If you want to do something different, you're going to come up against a lot of naysayers.
Emerging markets are hugely important.
Failure is an enigma. You worry about it, and it teaches you something.
Some people are academically inclined, some vocationally and we shouldn't penalise the latter.
I want entrepreneurs to be engineers and scientists and designers; they don't necessarily have to be Internet entrepreneurs or retail entrepreneurs.
You don't get inspiration sitting at a drawing board or in front of your computer.
Insurance companies don't make anything.
Anger is a good motivator.
Don't listen to experts.
Reality TV is anything but.
An inventor's path is chorused with groans, riddled with fist-banging and punctuated by head scratches.
I own every share of my company, and I don't want to sell any of it.
Fear is always a good motivator.
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.
Children want the challenge of difficult tasks - just look how much better they are than their parents on a computer.
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.
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.
It is an extreme perversion of capitalism if you can trade in something before you have even paid for it.
Britain's great strength is its innovative, design and engineering natural ability and we're not using it.
We should have A-levels in vocational subjects.
I think the search engines are the new equivalent of publishing: an enabler of information.
The computer dictates how you do something, whereas with a pencil you're totally free.
As a modern employer you have to treat people well.
There's nothing wrong with things taking time.
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.
When you can't compete on cost, compete on quality.
China can and will be an invaluable trading partner to both the U.S. and the U.K.
I don't design down to a price.
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 one size fits all approach of standardized testing is convenient but lazy.
I myself scraped seven poor passes at O-level.
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.
Business is constantly changing, constantly evolving.
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.
Design and technology should be the subject where mathematical brainboxes and science whizzkids turn their bright ideas into useful products.
Beauty can come in strange forms.
I'm not a businessman.
Nobody wants the expenditure of a lease on a factory which lasts 21 years. You can't plan 21 years ahead.
