“The difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.”

“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

You know you’re getting old when you stoop to tie your shoelaces and wonder what else you could do while you’re down there.

Whether it’s make good grades in school, be a good athlete, be a good person, go down and do some community service and help somebody who’s in need, whatever it is you choose to do, you’re investing your time in that.

If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn’t make your house look any better.

You always have to remember that bullies want to bring you down because you have something that they admire.

Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution.

I would sit down with a guitar and write 11 or 12 good songs for an album and that is gonna take a long time.

I’m more of a cringer at first and when it is years down the road and out of my way, I can actually appreciate it somehow.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.