67 Quotes by Adam Savage
Adam Savage is an American special effects designer, educator, and television personality. He was born in New York City in 1967 and is best known for co-hosting the television show "MythBusters," which aired from 2003 to 2016. Savage's expertise in prop and model-making has been featured in numerous films and television shows, including the "Star Wars" prequel trilogy and the movie "The Matrix Reloaded." He is also a vocal advocate for STEM education and has worked to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology. (Bio)
Adam Savage Quotes
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
Failure is always an option. (Meaning)
Being a geek is all about learning the inventories of things.
We are always works in progress. You will hurt people you love, and help people you detest. This is called being a human and it happens to everyone.
I have concluded through careful empirical analysis and much thought that somebody is looking out for me, keeping track of what I think about things, forgiving me when I do less than I ought. Giving me strength to shoot for more than I think I’m capable of. I believe they know everything that I do and think, and they still love me, and I’ve concluded, after careful consideration, that this person keeping score is me.
The coolest toys don't have to be bought; they can be built. In fact, sometimes the only way they'll ever exist is if you make them yourself.
If I had any dignity, that would have been humiliating.
It's sort of a mental attitude about critical thinking and curiosity. It's about mindset of looking at the world in a playful and curious and creative way.
Sometimes my brain writes a check that reality can't cash.
Don't work for fools. It's not worth it. Getting paid less to work for people you like and believe in is much better for you (and your career) in the long run.
I've learned over decades of building that a deadline is a potent tool for problem-solving.
In the spirit of science, there really is no such thing as a 'failed experiment.' Any test that yields valid data is a valid test.
Deadlines refine the mind. They remove variables like exotic materials and processes that take too long. The closer the deadline, the more likely you'll start thinking waaay outside the box. (Meaning)
I learned at an early age that I could make the things that I wanted. That's a very powerful thing to realize as a kid. LEGOs were a key part of that.
I like to work fast. I despise not having the right tool or, worse, knowing I have it but not being able to find it. It's a pointless delay that wrecks my pace - and mood.
I think one of the defining moments of adulthood is the realization that nobody's going to take care of you. That you have to do the heavy lifting while you're here. And when you don't, well, you suffer the consequences.
I have some ideas on how to fix that. They're not very good ideas, but at least they're ideas!
This is the point in the show where we say, 'Oh, what else do we have in the van that's flammable?'
The only thing that differentiates you and me from a couple of fourteen year old pyromaniacs is balistic glass!
I find that your basic Internet chat board is way too vitriolic for my taste.
I'm always going to be making costumes. It's one of the ways I relax my brain. In addition to the pleasure of having the piece, there is a deep and abiding pleasure for me assembling something in my head - learning to know something in its totality in my head, and then putting together all the constituent parts into a cohesive whole.
There's this group online that I frequent. It's a group of prop crazies just like me called the Replica Props Forum, and it's people who trade, make and travel in information about movie props.
We don't necessarily stand by our faults every time, but we will always stand by our methodologies and ethos.
From earliest times, humans - explorers and thinkers - have wanted to figure out the shape of their world. Forever, the way we've done that is through storytelling. It is difficult to let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Again, like I said, my life has been about being fascinated by objects and the stories that they tell, and also making them for myself, obtaining them, appreciating them and diving into them.
I think LEGOs are one of the best toys ever developed.
There are women who are wishing that they were that piece of tape right now.
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, and we both appreciate that the quickest and the dirtiest solution is usually the most elegant, the least expensive, and the fastest.
I'm actually the fourth generation in my family to have no practical use for the church, or God, or religion. My children continue this trend.
Mostly I make lists for projects. This can be daunting. Breaking something big into its constituent parts will help you organize your thoughts, but it can also force you to confront the depth of your ignorance and the hugeness of the task. That's OK. The project may be the lion, but the list is your whip.
The Internet is probably the most important technological advancement of my lifetime. Its strength lies in its open architecture and its ability to allow a framework where all voices can be heard.
Technology is usually there to let some process go on hidden in the background. For us on 'MythBusters,' we're always trying to make the process apparent. So, we have learned to try and never rely on a technological solution when an analogue one is in front of us.
Remember kids, I have life insurance.
There's few things that get you over your own crap more than working hard.
How hard can it be to blow up a room full of gasoline?!
Lists are how I parse and manage the world.
Am I missing an eyebrow?
My advice is keep your lips away from the spinning things.
It's a treat to see the sun rise over the desert. What am I saying? It's a treat to fire off a rocket car over the desert!
Audiences of critical thinkers are my favorite kinds of audiences. There are jokes I tell in the show that don't get laughs unless I am in front of an audience of critical thinkers. Put me in front of a crowd of science teachers or astronauts! The guileless aren't our audience - it's the critical thinkers we love.
Prayer doesn't work because someone out there is listening, it works because someone in here is listening. I've paid attention. I've pictured what I want to happen in my life. I've meditated extensively on my family, my future, my past actions and what did and didn't work for me about them.
Growing up in New York, I was sort of shocked when I realized that my children are Californians. They are 14 years old, and I explain to them frequently that they will never realize the glory of a snow day. You wake up and the world says, 'Oops, it's too much fun to go to school, you've got to stay home and deal with the snow!'
I'm not a sculptor; I'm a hard-edged model maker. You give me a drawing, you give me a prop to replicate, you give me a crane, scaffolding, parts from 'Star Wars' - especially parts from 'Star Wars' - I can do this stuff all day long. It's exactly how I made my living for 15 years.
That aesthetic of the Star Wars universe: the do-it-yourself, hotrod ethic that George Lucas exported from his childhood, is exactly the same kind of soul behind what we do and build for the show. It may not look pretty, but it gets the job done.
The fact is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century - it was actually mummified, skin and all - but in a fit of space-saving zeal, they actually cut off the head and they cut off the feet and they burned the rest in a bonfire.
That's our job - to strap rockets onto everything.
I think at this point, there's a certain bizarre chemistry between Jamie [Hyneman] and I that we can't ignore a lot of the mechanics of, that we're quite aware of. Half of it is absolutely genuine, and half of it is us playing around with that fact.
I would have to say that looked like it hurt.
New York State is giant and has some of the most beautiful landscape on the Eastern seaboard. There is so much history in New York State, from the Erie Canal to the Catskills, the birth of American stand-up comedy.
I'm obsessed with the form of a toolbox. The idea of a portable kit that has everything you might need ignites something inside me. It's like Batman's utility belt.
That was excellent! I mean, it didn't do anything, but it looked really cool!
In the summer of 2002, we had spent six weeks shooting the three pilots of Mythbusters, and Jamie[Hyneman] called me up afterward - well, first he called me up to tell me to clear my crap back out of his shop - and he said, "Well, that was kind of fun, wasn't it? I mean, I don't see where this could go, because we pretty much did everything. But it was fun."
The skeptical community is absolutely near and dear to the Mythbusters’ heart and there’s no small reason that they’ve embraced us. That’s our people. That’s the way we like to think.
I had saved a few hundred photos of dodo skeletons into my 'Creative Projects' folder - it's a repository for my brain, everything that I could possibly be interested in. Any time I have an Internet connection, there's a sluice of stuff moving into there, everything from beautiful rings to cockpit photos.
The main trend with the theme episodes is that anywhere there is a misconception about the way the physical world works, we're finding fertile material. Whether it's in a phrase like "going over like a lead balloon" or "a needle in a haystack," or tackling movie myths or even a genre, like MacGyver or James Bond, we're finding that all these things can lead to people believing the world works in a certain way. It might not be correct, but we can test out if it's true.
The explosions, like the urban legends, are a great way of bringing people in to watch, because it's really fun, and you know we're always going to give you a satisfying ending.
Let's get on our knees and pray. I don't know to whom. Is there a patron saint of ballistics gel?
After all those years of doing remote detonations, where we just push a button and something explodes, to actually see a nice big fat line of black smoke heading toward something that will blow up is very satisfying.
We're allowed to explore the world at large on these things; the urban-legend aspect of it is just kind of an excuse.
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. "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."
The idea of an ordered and elegant universe is a lovely one. One worth clinging to. But you don't need religion to appreciate the ordered existence. It's not just an idea, it's reality. We're discovering the hidden orders of the universe every day.
We cleared all traces of our occupation out of M6 and moved to M7, and it's been quite smooth over there. We chose a place all the way at the end of an industrial park.
Isn't television glamourous?
I felt like I had kind of played it out, and I wanted to see what was next, and then came Mythbusters. You know, it's the best job I've ever had, on its worst day it's better than anything else, but it's a huge amount of responsibility, and there are days when just going into work and building something from someone else's drawing sounds like going back to heaven.
I find it's too much for me to read endless critiques, even if we're being well-defended, of exactly what we're doing. When someone tells us something we're doing wrong on the boards, we try to respond, we try to be responsive to the fan boards, but yeah, I can't read them.
I just had one of those 'what the hell are we doing' moments.
― Adam Savage Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
