“How hard can it be to blow up a room full of gasoline?!”

“I agree your results aren’t always right,” they’ll say, “but your methods are clearly showing that science is a re-creative process, and it’s an interesting process because it’s messy, and no other shows show that.”

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

We must accept life for what it actually is – a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.

The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.

The world is full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.

When you have good friends you’ve been around, every time they talk, you don’t give them your full attention.

At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world. When he is seventy he still wants to reform the world, but he knows he can’t.

That is why prayer is so exhausting and so vital. If we believed it, the prayer meeting would be as full as the church.

When I do something, I do it full steam ahead.

The universe is full of dead people who lived by assumption.