“The idea of a portable kit that has everything you might need ignites something inside me. It’s like Batman’s utility belt.”

My dignity and good television – they’ll never meet.

And I’ve concluded, after careful consideration, that this person keeping score is me.

My advice is keep your lips away from the spinning things.

Of course, I love tools. I also love arranging them, to the point where I came up with a name for my organizing metric: first-order retrievability.

I think the whole thing that Jamie [Hyneman] and I have in working together is that we are constantly simplifying each other’s designs,

Don’t work for fools. It’s not worth it.

Bad spellers of the world untie!

These are people from everywhere, from Lawrence Livermore and JPL and Sandia National Labs, the FBI, all over the place, real scientists who see what we’re doing, and they consistently thank us.

We’re allowed to explore the world at large on these things; the urban-legend aspect of it is just kind of an excuse.

I’m always going to be making costumes. It’s one of the ways I relax my brain.

From earliest times, humans – explorers and thinkers – have wanted to figure out the shape of their world.

In addition to the pleasure of having the piece, there is a deep and abiding pleasure for me assembling something in my head

That was excellent! I mean, it didn’t do anything, but it looked really cool!

Firemen have the coolest toys ever!

The fact is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century

Well, first he called me up to tell me to clear my crap back out of his shop – and he said, “

I get inspiration from literally everything and anything.

Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.

Life is fragile. We’re not guaranteed a tomorrow so give it everything you’ve got.

With everything that is complex, we learn. If you don’t learn, then it’s an utter and abject failure. If you do learn, and you’re able to apply that to the next situation, then you take away a measure of success.

There is a time for everything – a time for being born and a time for coming of age. There is a time for death, too.

Everything is connected to everything else.

It wasn’t until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you’ve got to write your own books and nobody else’s, and then everything followed from there.

It is remarkable that men, when they differ in what they think considerable, will be apt to differ in almost everything else; their difference begets contradiction; contradiction begets heat; heat quickly rises into resentment, rage, and ill-will; thus they differ in affections, as they differ in judgment.