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Quotes
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- The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.
- When I was research head of General Motors and wanted a problem solved, I'd place a table outside the meeting room with a sign: LEAVE SLIDE RULES HERE! If I didn't do that, I'd find some engineer reaching for his slide rule. Then he'd be on his feet saying, Boss you can't do that.
- Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.
- Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
- An inventor is simply a person who doesn't take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates form college he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails maybe a thousand times. It he succeeds once then he's in. These two things are diametrically opposite. We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.
- There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.
- Problems are the price of progress. Don't bring me anything but trouble. Good news weakens me.
- If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it.
- My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.
- Thinking is one thing no one has ever been able to tax.
- The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.
- Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.
- There will always be a frontier where there is an open mind and a willing hand.
- Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future.
- It's amazing what ordinary people can do if they set out without preconceived notions.
- We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee to fail intelligently... to experiment over and over again and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.
- If a fellow wants to be a nobody in the business world, let him neglect sending the mail man to somebody on his behalf.
- You can't have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time.
- If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.
- People are very open-minded about new things. As long as they are exactly like the old ones.
- You will never stub your toe standing still. The faster you go, the more chance there is of stubbing your toe, but the more chance you have of getting somewhere.
- A person must have a certain amount of intelligent ignorance to get anywhere.
- We need to teach the highly educated man that it is not a disgrace to fail and that he must analyze every failure to find its cause. He must learn how to fail intelligently, for failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.
- 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.
- In America we can say what we think, and even if we can't think, we can say it anyhow.
- We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.
- An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn’t take his education too seriously.
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Charles Franklin Kettering was an American inventor, engineer, businessman, and the holder of 186 patents. He was a founder of Delco, and was head of research at General Motors from 1920 to 1947. Among his most widely used automotive inventions were the electrical starting motor and leaded gasoline. In association with the DuPont Chemical Company, he was also responsible for the invention of Freon refrigerant for refrigeration and air conditioning systems, as well as for the development of Duco lacquers and enamels, the first practical colored paints for mass-produced automobiles. While working with the Dayton-Wright Company he developed the "Bug" aerial torpedo, considered the world's first aerial missile. He led the advancement of practical, lightweight two-stroke diesel engines, revolutionizing the locomotive and heavy equipment industries. In 1927, he founded the Kettering Foundation, a non-partisan research foundation.
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