William Clay Ford, Jr. Quotes

Whenever I'm at a party, people are always telling me either to get a new quarterback or make the Taurus back seat bigger.

I don't want anybody, whether it's my grandchildren or any of our employees' grandchildren, to have to apologise for working for Ford Motor Company. In fact, I want the opposite. I want them to look and say, 'What a difference we made!'

Individuals and companies that want to be successful in the 21st century will need to be leaders in using the Internet and related technology.

Cars will talk to each other and the world around them to make driving both safer and more efficient. 'Vehicle-to-vehicle' and 'vehicle-to-infrastructure' connectivity will become commonplace.

I used to wonder if running a large industrial company would really square with my values.

Ford comes first before everything else I do in my life.

My great-grandfather was a man of great vision, drive, and native intelligence, with some human flaws amplified by limited education, limited social range, and questionable influence from some of his advisers.

I walked in and inherited a management group that I didn't know very well. They didn't know me, and we had a very short window to put together a credible recovery plan.

I believe very strongly that corporations could and should be a major force for resolving social and environmental concerns in the twenty-first century.

I don't ever want to believe my own press clippings, good or bad.

There are almost no limits in terms of what a car can become.

I never wanted Ford to be a place, like the tobacco industry, where our employees were not proud of coming to work for us. I felt there was a danger of that, should we be marginalized as a major polluter.

I was an absolutely untalented designer.

When I joined Ford, in the late 1970s, I felt strongly we could not forever be a huge user of natural resources without there being consequences. But I was alone in my thinking in those days.

Lyft is enabling an exciting new model of freedom and personal mobility, as evidenced by its millions of satisfied users.

S.U.V.'s are under a lot of scrutiny these days, and yet the S.U.V. buyer is a very loyal lot.

I'm not motivated by money or power or fame. In the end, it doesn't bring much happiness. The only thing that is driving me is self-satisfaction, self-validation.

There are people who think I'm a Bolshevik, and this is all a major distraction at best and heresy at worst. But I really don't care.

Just think in terms of green energy and how much time, money, brain power and policy action has started to pour into green energy, and I think that's wonderful. We're going to need that same kind of effort towards global gridlock if we're going to keep the individual mobility that we all take for granted today.

The climate is changing, and anyone who disagrees is, in my view, still in denial.

I think I was the first executive to ever speak at a Greenpeace business conference, in London in 2001. That didn't play well here at Ford, but I thought it was an important signal to send internally, that these were the kind of issues we needed to be grappling with.

I don't care where you are in the world, people are aware of what technology is available to others. If you're in Nairobi, you're certainly aware of the iPhone.

There is a great demand everywhere in the world for individual mobility. People like the fact they are not on somebody else's schedule. They can come and go as they please.

Lewis Booth and Derrick Kuzak represent the very best of Ford and our culture and built a legacy of leadership, integrity and commitment to excellence that will benefit us for years to come.

The day will come when the notion of car ownership becomes antiquated. If you live in a city, you don't need to own a car.

As the technology is developed, autonomous driving could provide driving opportunities for the physically challenged or enable the elderly to continue driving longer. This will be vital as many nations experience an aging population.

All things being equal, I think people would still prefer to do business with their hometown companies. That's true in America, that's true in China, that's true in Germany.

As long as gas is cheaper than bottled water, we can't be in a position of dictating to the consumer what to buy.

Manufacturing still has the greatest multiplier effect, in terms of job creation, of any sector of the economy.

What cooler way to grow up for an American boy than to be around cars and football?

The Ford Motor Co. should stand for something more than cars and trucks. There is a Ford way of doing things that we cannot lose ... We need to be continuously polishing that Ford oval.

It's hard to store natural gas. And it does require big storage tanks. So it doesn't work very well on passenger cars.

The Ford family wants the company to succeed. Period.