Charles Kettering Quotes

I object to people running down the future. I am going to live all the rest of my life there.

If a fellow wants to be nobody in the business world, let him neglect sending the mailman to somebody on his behalf.

It is not a disgrace to fail. Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.

People think of the inventor as a screwball, but no one ever asks the inventor what he thinks of other people.

Learn how to fail intelligently.

The whole fun of living is trying to make something better.

A problem thoroughly understood is always fairly simple. Found your opinions on facts, not prejudices. We know too many things that are not true.

The person who doesn't know something can't be done will often find a way to go ahead and do it.

This problem, too, will look simple after it is solved.

I think that the greatest education in the world is the education which helps one to be able to do the right things at the time it has to be done.

The future can be anything we want it to be, providing we have the faith and that we realize that peace, no less than war, required blood and sweat and tears.

We have been measuring too much in terms of the dollar. What we should do is think in terms of useful materials-things that will be of value to us in our daily life.

We are just in the kindergarten of uncovering things; there is no downcurve in science.

Industry prospers when it offers people articles which they want more than they want anything they now have. The fact is that people never buy what they need. They buy what they want.

And there is the point exactly, we are all the time blaming difficulties on to something else. Our real trouble is that we are too soft to solve the problem.

The sure ways to create new ventures of discovery are to keep an open mind.

If I want to stop a research program I can always do it by getting a few experts to sit in on the subject, because they know right away that it was a fool thing to try in the first place.

It is easy to build a philosophy - it doesn't have to run

In many ways ideas are more important than people - they are much more permanent.

Research is an organized method for keeping you reasonably dissatisfied with what you have.

you must take the problem as it is, and let it be what it wants to be.

People see the wrongness in an idea much quicker that the rightness.

Education is man's going forward from cocksure ignorance to thoughtful uncertainty.Where there is an open mind there will always be a frontier.

The typical eye sees the ten per cent bad of an idea and overlooks the ninety per cent good.

Do not bring me your successes; they weaken me. Bring me your problems; they strengthen me.

One of the things we have to be thankful for is that we don't get as much government as we pay for.

I often say that research is a way of finding out what you are going to do when you can't keep on doing what you are doing now.

There has never been any 30-hour week for men who had anything to do.

We have a lot of people revolutionizing the world because they've never had to present a working model.

A research problem is not solved by apparatus; it is solved in a man's head.

Bankers regard research as most dangerous a thing that makes banking hazardous due to the rapid changes it brings about in industry.

We have reason not to be afraid of the machine, for there is always constructive change, the enemy of machines, making them change to fit new conditions.

Don't bring anything to me but trouble.

A person must have a certain amount of intelligent ignorance to get anywhere.

We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.