Henry Ford Quotes

Working together is success.

Any decision you make isn't worth a tinkers damn until you have formed the habit of making and keeping it.

Profit is a by-product of work; happiness is its chief product.

Progress through cautious, well founded experiments.

Every one knows that insufficient rest and gorging are not good for anyone, either physically or mentally.

One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn't do.

I foresee the time when industry shall no longer denude the forests which require generations to mature, nor use up the mines which were ages in making, but shall draw its raw material largely from the annual produce of the fields. I am convinced that we shall be able to get out of yearly crops most of the basic materials which we now get from forest and mine.

Don't cheapen the product; don't cheapen the wage; don't overcharge the public. Put brains into the method, and more brains, and still more brains - do things better than ever before; and by this means all parties to business are served and benefited.

The only motive that can keep politics pure is the motive of doing good for one's country and its people.

If you hope to be independent when there is money, you'll never reach it. On this world, humans can only safely have the knowledge, experience and ability

Paying attention to simple little things that most men neglect makes a few men rich.

We live in an era of tremendous facts. And the facts are facts. They are also unpleasant facts, which does not decrease their factual percentage one bit. Our job is to understand them, to recognize their presence, to learn if we can what they signify and not to fall into the error of minimizing facts because they have a bitter flavor.

An educated person, I think, is one who not only knows a lot, but knows how to do a lot of things.

Many people are busy trying to find better ways of doing things that should not have to be done at all. There is no progress in merely finding a better way to do a useless thing.

People are as happy as they choose to be.

Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.

All life is experience, and one level is exchanged for another only when its lesson is learned.

The idea of gas engines was by no means new, but this was the first time that a really serious effort had been made to put them on the market. They were received with interest rather than enthusiasm and I do not recall any one who thought that the internal combustion engine could ever have more than a limited use. All the wise people demonstrated conclusively that the engine could not compete with steam. They never thought that it might carve out a career for itself. That is the way with wise people
they are so wise and practical that they always know to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the limitations. That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts. They would have so much good advice that I could be sure they would do little work.

Of course, it is not the employer who pays wages. He only handles the money. It is the product that pays wages and it is the management that arranges the production so that the product may pay the wages.

The workingmen have been exploited all the way up and down the line by employers, landlords, everybody.

Whether we think we can or cannot, we are right.

Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don't need it: if you are sick you should not take it.

When the leaves of the strongest tree fall, spring is here.

Money doesn't change men, it merely unmasks them. If a man is naturally selfish or arrogant or greedy, the money brings that out, that's all.

Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.

I can visualize the time when almost every family will have a small plane in their back yard.

That is the way I have always worked. I draw a plan and work out every detail on the plan before starting to build. For otherwise one will waste a great deal of time in makeshifts as the work goes on and the finished article will not have coherence. It

Progress is not made by pulling off a series of stunts. Each step has to be regulated. A man cannot expect to progress without thinking.

Speculation into thing already produced that is not business

The thing to do with money is to put it back into yourself, into your work, into the thing that is important, into whatever you are so much interested in that it is more important than money.

I determined absolutely that never would I join a company in which finance came before the work or in which bankers or financiers had a part. And further that, if there were no way to get started in the kind of business that I thought could be managed in the interest of the public, then I simply would not get started at all. For my own short experience, together with what I saw going on around me, was quite enough proof that business as a mere money-making game was not worth giving much thought to and was distinctly no place for a man who wanted to accomplish anything. Also it did not seem to me to be the way to make money. I have yet to have it demonstrated that it is the way. For the only foundation of real business is service.

Patience and foresight are the two most important qualities in business

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs

For most purposes, a man with a machine is better than a man without a machine.

Competition whose motive is merely to compete, to drive some other fellow out, never carries very far.

New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, they just don't know what the hell the rest of the United States is.

Every business is a monarchy with, not a man, but an idea as king.

If there is one thing which I would banish from the earth it is fear.

Enthusiasm is the sparkle in your eyes, the swing in your gait.

People are never so likely to be wrong as when they are organized. And they never have so little freedom. Perhaps that is why the people at large keep their freedom. People can be manipulated only when they are organized.

My grandfather killed my father in my mind. I know he died of cancer-but it was because of what my grandfather did to him.

The object of living is work, experience, happiness.

Always demanding the best of oneself, living with honor, devoting one's talents and gifts to the benefits of others - these are the measures of success that endure when material things have passed away.

I cannot say that it was hard work. No work with interest is ever hard. I always am certain of results. They always come if you work hard enough. But it was a very great thing to have my wife even more confident than I was. She has always been that way.

To lift farm drudgery off flesh and blood and lay it on steel and motors has been my most constant ambition

Advancement begins within the man himself; when he advances from half-interest to strength of purpose; when he advances from hesitancy to decisive directness; when he advances from immaturity to maturity of judgment; when he advances from apprenticeship to mastery; when he advances from a mere dilettante at labour to a worker who finds a genuine joy in work; when he advances from an eye-server to one who can be entrusted to do his work without oversight and without prodding - why, then the world advances!

An educated man is not one whose memory is trained to carry a few dates in history - he is one who can accomplish things.

A company that does not produce anything other than money is a poor business

I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.

There should be no unemployment. There is large percentage of labor now which cannot make a living because wages are not high enough. That is industry's 2nd job. 1st job is to make good product. 2nd pay a good wage.

We now know that anything which is economically right is also morally right. There can be no conflict between good economics and good morals.

Jews have always controlled the business ... The motion picture influence of the United States and Canada ... is exclusively under the control, moral and financial, of the Jewish manipulators of the public mind.

If people understood how the economic system works, there'd be a revolution in a minute.

The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life.

The time is coming when man will be able to determine the length of his lifespan by controlling his diet.

Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves which we endure help us in our marching onward.

I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say definitely what is and what is not possible.

It is the customer that pays the wages

A man given to pride is usually proud of the wrong thing.

Speculation is only a word covering the making of money out of the manipulation of prices, instead of supplying goods and services.

If you do what you always did, you get what you always gotten

Our help does not come from Washington, but from ourselves.

A low wage business is always insecure.

Failure is the opportunity to begin again, only more intelligently.

An underpaid man is a customer reduced in purchasing power. He cannot buy. Business depression is caused by weakened purchasing power. Purchasing power is weakened by uncertainty or insufficiency of income. The cure of business depression is through purchasing power, and the source of purchasing power is wages.

There had been observed in this country certain streams of influence which are causing a marked deterioration in our literature, amusements, and social conduct ... a nasty Orientalism which had insidiously affected every channel of expression ... The fact that these influences are all traceable to one racial source [Judaism] is something to be reckoned with ... Our opposition is only in ideas, false ideas, which are sapping the moral stamina of the people.

If two people agree, one of them is unnecessary.

Nothing can be made except by makers, nothing can be managed except by managers. Money cannot make anything and money cannot manage anything.

Failure is the chance to do it better next time.

If there is unemployment in America, it is because the unemployed do not want to work.

Whether you think you can, or you think you can't
you're right.

My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.

The public should always be wondering how it is possible to give so much for the money.

Coming together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.

None of our men are 'experts.' We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and how efficient he is. Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the 'expert' state of mind a great number of things become impossible.

Our country is still young and its potential is still enormous. We should remember, as we look toward the future, that the more fully we believe in and achieve freedom and equal opportunity - not simply for ourselves but for others - the greater our accomplishments as a nation will be.

A poor man is not the one without a cent. A poor man is the one without a dream.

( ... )the question of the Jews has come to the fore, but like other questions which lend themselves to prejudice, efforts will be made to hush it up as impolitic for open discussion. If, however, experience has taught us anything it is that questions thus suppressed will sooner or later break out in undesirable and unprofitable forms.

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.

There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. There's enough alcohol in one year's yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years.

Understand the difference between being at work and working.

No government can guarantee security. It can only tax production, distribution and service and gradually crush the power to pay taxes. That settles nothing. It only uses up the gains of the past and postpones the developments of the future.

Change is not always progress ... A fever of newness had been everywhere confused with the spirit of progress.

If you think of standardization as the best that you know today, but which is to be improved tomorrow; you get somewhere.

Then why flounder around waiting for good business? Get the costs down by better management. Get the prices down to the buying power.

The question who ought to be boss is like who ought to be the tenor in the quartet? Obviously, the man who can sing tunor.

I see no advantage in these new clocks. They run no faster than the ones made 100 years ago.

Every man is entitled to make a darn fool of himself at least once in a lifetime.

Reading musses up my mind.

Business must be run at a profit, else it will die. But when anyone tries to run a business solely for profit, then also the business must die, for it no longer has a reason for existence.

To see a thing clearly in the mind makes it begin to take form.

Wars do not end wars any more than an extraordinarily large conflagration does away with the fire hazard.

There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.

America is not a land of money but of wealth-not a land of rich people, but of successful workers.

Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.

You can't tell me you can make any system or country work with low wages and high prices, and high wages with high prices don't mean anything when the prices eat up the wages and don't leave anything over.

History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we made today.

Thinking is hard work, which is why so few people do it.

Most of the present acute troubles of the world arise out of taking on new ideas without first carefully investigating to discover if they are good ideas. An idea is not necessarily good because it is old, or necessarily bad because it is new, but if an old idea works, then the weight of the evidence is all in its favor. Ideas

Who stops learning may be old.